It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.
Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion.
Keep one thing in view forever- the truth; and if you do this, though it may seem to lead you away from the opinion of men, it will assuredly conduct you to the throne of God.
Education alone can conduct us to that enjoyment which is, at once, best in quality and infinite in quantity.
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.
Education is our only political safety. Outside of this ark all is deluge.
Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.
A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them.
Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.
The highest service we can perform for others is to help them help themselves.
Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.
Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.
You may as well borrow a person’s money as his time.
Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.
Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear.
Genius may conceive but patient labor must consummate.
If ever there was a cause, if ever there can be a cause, worthy to be upheld by all of toil or sacrifice that the human heart can endure, it is the cause of Education.
Every event in this world is the effect of some precedent cause, and also the cause of some subsequent effect.
We are prone to seek immediate pleasure or good, however small, rather than remote pleasure or good, however vast.