Astronomy is one of the sublimest fields of human investigation. The mind that grasps its facts and principles receives something of the enlargement and grandeur belonging to the science itself. It is a quickener of devotion.

A house without books is like a room without windows. No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he has the means to buy them. It is a wrong to his family. He cheats them! Children learn to read by being in the presence of books. The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.

The Chinese have an excellent proverb: "Be modest in speech, but excel in action.

Under the Providence of God, our means of education are the grand machinery by which the 'raw material' of human nature can be worked up into inventors and discoverers, into skilled artisans and scientific farmers, into scholars and jurists, into the founders of benevolent institutions, and the great expounders of ethical and theological science.

When you introduce into our schools a spirit of emulation, you have present the keenest spur admissible to the youthful intellect.

Virtue is an angel, but she is a blind one, and must ask Knowledge to show her the pathway that leads to her goal.

Jails and prisons are the complement of schools; so many less as you have of the latter, so many more must you have of the former.