Strange how it was always the spoiled who weakened and cried first, and it was the injured, the maimed, the blind, and the poor who fought on alone.
Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That’s absolute nonsense. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long.
Luck comes to a man who puts himself in the way of it. You went where something might be found and you found something, simple as that.
A man can learn a lot if he listens, and if I didn’t learn anything else I was learning how much I didn’t know.
One learns to adapt to the land in which one lives.
To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.
Books are the building blocks of civilization and a people without books are a people without history, a people with no story older than the tales of the oldest man or woman.
He who plants a tree is a servant of God.
Books are precious things, but more than that, they are the strong backbone of civilization. They are the thread upon which it all hangs, and they can save us when all else is lost.
It is an old custom of these people to pick up a stone and toss it on the pile. Perhaps it is a symbolical lightening of the load they carry, perhaps a small offering to the gods of the trails.
The one law that does not change is that everything changes, and the hardship I was bearing today was only a breath away from the pleasures I would have tomorrow, and those pleasures would be all the richer because of the memories of this I was enduring.
Beware of those who would use violence, too often it is violence they want and neither truth nor freedom.
One thing has always been true: That book or that person who can give me an idea or a new slant on an old idea is my friend.
Even those who fancy themselves the most progressive will fight against other kinds of progress, for each of us is convinced that our way is the best way.
The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.
A parent or a teacher has only his lifetime; a good book can teach forever.
Revenge could steal a man’s life until there was nothing left but emptiness.
Hate would destroy him who hated.
Education is everywhere, prompting one to think, to consider, to remember.
In the United States we have concentrated tremendous sums of money on the educational plant, seemingly with the idea that the right number of buildings will turn out the right number of graduates. Yet the teachers who actually instruct the future citizens of our country are more often than not miserably paid. If in the future we find ourselves with a lot of fourth-rate citizens, we have only ourselves to blame.