Manners are the root, laws only the trunk and branches. Manners are the archetypes of laws. Manners are laws in their infancy; laws are manners fully grown,--or, manners are children, which, when they grow up, become laws.

Love not only occupies the higher lobes of the brain, but crowds out the lower to make room for its expansion.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

You may be liberal in your praise where praise is due: it costs nothing; it encourages much.

If you wish to write well, study the life about you,--life in the public streets.

Without undervaluing any other human agency, it may be safely affirmed that the Common School, improved and energized, as it can easily be, may become the most effective and benignant of all the forces of civilization. Two reasons sustain this position. In the first place, there is a universality in its operation, which can be affirmed of no other institution whatever... And, in the second place, the materials upon which it operates are so pliant and ductile as to be susceptible of assuming a greater variety of forms than any other earthly work of the Creator.

Ideality is the avant-courier of the mind.