Be ever gentle with the children God has given you; watch over them constantly; reprove them earnestly, but not in anger. In the forcible language of Scripture, "Be not bitter against them." "Yes, they are good boys," I once heard a kind father say. "I talk to them very much, but do not like to beat my, children--the world will beat them." It was a beautiful thought not elegantly expressed.

Forming characters! Whose? Our own or others? Both. And in that momentous fact lies the peril and Responsibility of our existence.

All that I have accomplished ... has been by that plodding, patient, persevering process of accretion which builds the ant heap particle by particle, thought by thought, fact by fact.

No human being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the sum total of human happiness.

Those orators who give us much noise and many words, but little argument and less wit, and who are the loudest when least lucid, should take a lesson from the great volume of nature; she often gives us the lightning without the thunder, but never the thunder without the lightning.

Kindness is the music of Good Will to men, and on this harp the smallest fingers may play heaven's sweetest tunes on earth.

All the beautiful orders of architecture and creations of the pencil, all the conceptions of the beautiful in nature and art and humanity, are inventions extorted, as it were, from the mind to extend and increase the pleasures of sense.