Poverty is very good in poems but very bad in the house; very good in maxims and sermons but very bad in practical life.

Nothing dies so hard, or rallies so often as intolerance.

A man without a vote is in this land like a man without a hand.

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. By these tendrils we clasp it and climb thitherward. And why do we think that we are separated from them? We never half knew them, nor in this world could.

A dull ax never loves grindstones.

Morality is good, and is accepted of God, as far as it goes; but the difficulty is, it does not go far enough.

We know that the gifts which men have do not come from the schools. If a man is a plain, literal, factual man, you can make a great deal more of him in his own line by education than without education, just as you can make a great deal more of a potato if you cultivate it than if you do not; but no cultivation in this world will ever make an apple out of a potato.