If you are idle, you are on the road to ruin; and there are few stopping-places upon it. It is rather a precipice than a road

There is tonic in the things that men do not love to hear. Free speech is to a great people what the winds are to oceans ... and where free speech is stopped miasma is bred, and death comes fast.

To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them - the whole leaf and root tribe.

Mirth is God's medicine. Everybody ought to bathe in it. Grim care, moroseness, anxiety,--all this rust of life, ought to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. It is better than emery. Every man ought to rub himself with it. A man without mirth is like a wagon without springs, in which one is caused disagreeably to jolt by every pebble over which it runs.

Oftentimes great and open temptations are the most harmless because they come with banners flying and bands playing and all the munitions of war in full view, so that we know we are in the midst of enemies that mean us damage, and we get ready to meet and resist them. Our peculiar dangers are those that surprise us and work treachery in our fort.

Refinement that carries us away from our fellow-men is not God's refinement.

The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day.