Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture.
It is worth while too to warn the teacher that undue severity in correcting faults is liable at times to discourage a boy’s mind from effort.
For all the best teachers pride themselves on having a large number of pupils and think themselves worthy of a bigger audience.
God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.
Without natural gifts technical rules are useless.
In a crowd, on a journey, at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.
Nothing is more dangerous to men than a sudden change of fortune.
In almost everything, experience is more valuable than precept.
Study depends on the goodwill of the student, a quality that cannot be secured by compulsion.
When defeat is inevitable, it is wisest to yield.
It is the nurse that the child first hears, and her words that he will first attempt to imitate.
The mind is exercised by the variety and multiplicity of the subject matter, while the character is moulded by the contemplation of virtue and vice.
There is no one who would not rather appear to know than to be taught.
Nature herself has never attempted to effect great changes rapidly.
For it would have been better that man should have been born dumb, nay, void of all reason, rather than that he should employ the gifts of Providence to the destruction of his neighbor.
Where evil habits are once settled, they are more easily broken than mended.
The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.
Medicine for the dead is too late.
A religion without mystics is a philosophy.
Conscience is a thousand witnesses.