There is nothing that is so wonderfully created as the human soul. There is something of God in it. We are infinite in the future, though we are finite in the past.

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.

True elegance becomes the more so as it approaches simplicity.

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.

An oyster, that marvel of delicacy, that concentration of sapid excellence, that mouthful bwefore all other mouthfuls, who first had faith to believe it, and courage to execute? The exterior is not persuasive.

There are three schoolmasters for everybody that will employ them - the senses, intelligent companions, and books.

A little library, growing every year, is an honorable part of a man’s history. It is a man’s duty to have books.