There is no friendship, no love, like that of the parent for the child.

Take all the robes of all the good judges that have ever lived on the face of the earth, and they would not be large enough to cover the iniquity of one corrupt judge.

Boys have their soft and gentle moods too. You would suppose by the morning racket that nothing could be more foreign to their nature than romance and vague sadness. . . . But boys have hours of great sinking and sadness, when kindness and fondness are peculiarly needful to them.

It is defeat that turns bone to flint, gristle to muscle, and makes men invincible.

There is a temperate zone in the mind, between luxurious indolence and exacting work; and it is to this region, just between laziness and labor, that summer reading belongs.

The morbid states of health, the irritableness of disposition arising from unstrung nerves, the impatience, the crossness, the fault-finding of men, who, full of morbid influences, are unhappy themselves, and throw the cloud of their troubles like a dark shadow upon others, teach us what eminent duty there is in health.

Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.