Figure to yourself what the year would sustain were the spring taken away: such a loss do they sustain who trifle in youth.
The strength of a nation, especially of a republican nation, is in the intelligent and well ordered homes of the people.
In early childhood you may lay the foundation of poverty or riches, industry or idleness, good or evil, by the habits to which you train your children. Teach them right habits then, and their future life is safe.
Something will be gathered from the tablets of the most faultless day for regrets.
Pride is a fruitful source of uneasiness. It keeps the mind in disquiet. Humility is the antidote to this evil.
As nothing truly valuable can be attained without industry, so there can be no persevering industry without a deep sense of the value of time.
Youth would be too happy, might it add to its own beauty and felicity the wisdom and experience of riper years. Were it possible for it to realize the worth of time, as life’s receding hours reveal it, how rapidly would it press on towards perfection!
Habits, though in their commencement like the filmy line of the spider, trembling at every breeze, may in the end prove as links of tempered steel, binding a deathless being to eternal felicity or woe.
There must be some mixture of happiness in everything but sin.
The soul of woman lives in love.
The vanity of shining in conversation is usually subversive of its own desires.
There is a lore simple and sure, that asks no discipline of weary years – the language of the soul, told through the eye.
Prosperity, alas! is often but another name for pride.
Vigorous exercise will often fortify a feeble constitution.
An appearance of delicacy is inseparable from sweetness and gentleness of character.
Ye say they all have passed away, That noble race and brave; That their light canoes have vanished From off the crested wave; That mid the forests where they roamed There rings no hunter’s shout; But their name is on your waters; Ye may not wash it out.
Not on the outer world For inward joy depend; Enjoy the luxury of thought, Make thine own self friend; Not with the restless throng, In search of solace roam But with an independent zeal Be intimate at home.
As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward.
The glorified spirit of the infant is as a star to guide the mother to its own blissful clime.
The true order of learning should be first, what is necessary; second, what is useful, and third, what is ornamental. To reverse this arrangement is like beginning to build at the top of the edifice.