Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.

Difficulties are God's errands; and when we are sent upon them, we should esteem it a proof of God's confidence.

No town can fail of beauty, though its walks were gutters and its houses hovels, if venerable trees make magnificent colonnades along its streets.

All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.

The bibliophile is the master of his books, the bibliomaniac their slave.

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.

Many men want wealth,--not a competence alone, but a live-story competence. Everything subserves this; and religion they would like as a sort of lightning-rod to their houses, to ward off by and by the bolts of Divine wrath.