Compulsory education... It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise, — but above all — by example.

It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity.

In the utmost solitudes of nature, the existence of hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand spiritual utterances as that of heaven.

An infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all truly great men.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man.

We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!