Nothing is more damaging to you than to do something that you believe is wrong.

The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.

I believe, if we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and their hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class. There seems ever to have been a proneness in the brilliant and warm-blooded to fall into this vice.

If you are resolutely determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. It is but a small matter whether you read with anyone or not. I did not read with anyone. Get the books, and read and study them till you understand them in their principal features; and that is the main thing. It is of no consequence to be in a large town while you are reading. I read at New Salem, which never had three hundred people living in it. The books, and your capacity for understanding them, are just the same in all places.

Half finished work generally proves to be labor lost.

the better angels of our nature

If we cannot give freedom to every creature, let us do nothing that will impose slavery upon any other creature.