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

False conclusions which have been reasoned out are infinitely worse than blind impulse.

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.

A teacher should, above all things, first induce a desire in the pupil for the acquisition he wishes to impart.

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

Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.

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