I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.

What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honorable, than that of teaching?

Keep innocency, and take heed unto the thing that is right, for that shall bring a man peace at the last.

Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.

It is not quite true that there are no good letters written in America: among my own circle of correspondents there, there are ladies and gentlemen whose letters would stand a comparison with any for frankness, grace, and epistolary beauty of every kind. But I am not aware of any medium between this excellence and the boarding-school insignificance which characterizes the rest.

I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.

[On being deaf:] How much less pain there is in calmly estimating the enjoyments from which we must separate ourselves, of bravely saying, for once and for ever, 'Let them go,' than in feeling them waste and dwindle, till their very shadows escape from our grasp!