The great lesson of biography is to show what man can be and do at his best. A noble life put fairly on record acts like an inspiration to others.
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.
If character be irrecoverably lost, then indeed there will be nothing left worth saving.
The life of a good man is at the same time the most eloquent lesson of virtue and the most severe reproof of vice.
Those who aren’t making mistakes probably aren’t making anything.
It is the close observation of little things which is the secret of success in business, in art, in science, and in every pursuit of life.
Mere political reform will not cure the manifold evils which now afflict society. There requires a social reform, a domestic reform, an individual reform.
Men often discover their affinity to each other by the mutual love they have for a book.
There is no act, however trivial, but has its train of consequences.
National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.
Necessity, oftener than facility, has been the mother of invention; and the most prolific school of all has been the school of difficulty.
All that is great in man comes through work; and civilization is its product.
There are many persons of whom it may be said that they have no other possession in the world but their character, and yet they stand as firmly upon it as any crowned king.
All experiences of life seems to prove that the impediments thrown in the way of the human advancement may for the most part be overcome by steady good conduct, honest zeal, activity, perseverance and above all, by a determined resolution to surmount.
The great high-road of human welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast, well-doing; and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will invariably be the most successful; success treads on the heels of every right effort.
Character is undergoing constant change, for better or for worse – either being elevated on the one hand, or degraded on the other.