Bodies are cleansed by water; the mind is purified by truth.

Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.

Those who exert the first influence upon the mind have the greatest power.

Superiority to circumstances is one of the most prominent characteristics of great men.

If evil is inevitable, how are the wicked accountable? Nay, why do we call men wicked at all? Evil is inevitable, but is also remediable.

Knowledge is but an instrument, which the profligate and the flagitious may use as well as the brave and the just.

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.