When the panting and thirsting soul first drinks the delicious waters of truth, when the moral and intellectual tastes and desires first seize the fragrant fruits that flourish in the garden of knowledge, then does the child catch a glimpse and foretaste of heaven.

Education is an organic necessity of a human being.

Give me a house furnished with books rather than furniture! Both, if you can, but books at any rate!

But let a man know that there are things to be known, of which he is ignorant, and it is so much carved out of his domain of universal knowledge.

As an innovation... the establishment of Free Schools was the boldest ever promulgated, since the commencement of the Christian era... Time has ratified its soundness. Two centuries proclaim it to be as wise as it was courageous, as beneficient as it was disinterested. It was one of those grand mental and moral experiments... The sincerity of our gratitude must be tested by our efforts to perpetuate and improve what they established. The gratitude of the lips only is an unholy offering.

Affectation hides three times as many virtues as charity does sins.

To pity distress is but human; to relieve it is Godlike.