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.

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

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

Many a man has been dined out of his religion, and his politics, and his manhood, almost.

Our moral faculties must be placed highest, else they can no more flourish than could a plant growing under the shade and drip of trees.

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly; more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.