The whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men are convertible.
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
The betrothed and accepted lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden by her acceptance. She was heaven while he pursued her, but she cannot be heaven if she stoops to one such as he!
Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.
The evils of popular government appear greater than they are; there is compensation for them in spirit and energy it awakens.
Wealth is in applications of mind to nature; and the art of getting rich consists not in industry, much less in saving, but in a better order, in timeliness, in being at the right spot.
Commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred.
Culture is one thing and varnish is another.
Every man passes his life in the search after friendship.
Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two in a thought, in a feeling.
In the right hands, literature is not resorted to as a consolation, and by the broken and decayed, but as a decalogue.
A collector recently bought at public auction, in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a school-boy can read Hamlet and can detect secrets of highest concernment yet unpublished therein.
There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.
Nature magically suits a man to his fortunes, by making them the fruit of his character.
Discontent is want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will.
Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfillments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.
The foolish man wonders at the unusual, but the wise man at the usual.
In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.
Government has come to be a trade, and is managed solely on commercial principles. A man plunges into politics to make his fortune, and only cares that the world shall last his days.
All violence, all that is dreary and repels, is not power, but the absence of power.