Men must necessarily be the active agents of their own well-being and well-doing they themselves must in the very nature of things be their own best helpers.
The shortest way to do many things is to do one at a time.
Sympathy is the golden key that unlocks the hearts of others.
Knowledge conquered by labor becomes a possession -a property entirely our own.
Politeness goes far, yet costs nothing.
Commonplace though it may appear, this doing of one’s duty embodies the highest ideal of life and character. There may be nothing heroic about it; but the common lot of men is not heroic.
Make good thy standing place, and move the world.
Those who are the most persistent, and work in the true spirit, will invariably be the most successful.
For want of self-restraint many men are engaged all their lives in fighting with difficulties of their own making.
Fortune has often been blamed for her blindness; but fortune is not so blind as men are. Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators.
I see nothing quite conclusive in the art of temporal government, But violence, duplicity and frequent malversation. King rules or barons rule: The strong man strongly and the weak man by caprice. They have but one law, to seize the power and keep it.
The great leader attracts to himself men of kindred character, drawing them towards him as the loadstone draws iron.
The knowledge and experience which produce wisdom can only become a man’s individual possession and property by his own free action; and it is as futile to expect these without laborious, painstaking effort, as it is to hope to gather a harvest where the seed has not been sown.
Commit a child to the care of a worthless, ignorant woman, and no culture in after-life will remedy the evil you have done.
Success treads on the heels of every right effort; and though it is possible to overestimate success to the extent of almost deifying it, as is sometimes done, still in any worthy pursuit it is meritorious.
Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in afterlife the images first presented to it. The first thing continues forever with the child. The first joy, the first sorrow, the first success, the first failure, the first achievement, the first misadventure, paint the foreground of his life.
The brave man is an inspiration to the weak, and compels them, as it were, to follow him.
Home is the first and most important school of character. It is there that every human being receives his best moral training, or his worst; for it is there that he imbibes those principles of conduct which endure through manhood, and cease only with life.
Any number of depraved units cannot form a great nation.
The tiniest bits of opinion sown in the minds of children in private life afterwards issue forth to the world, and become its public opinion; for nations are gathered out of nurseries.