Nothing is denied to well-directed labor.

If you have great talents, industry will improve them: if you have but moderate abilities, industry will supply their deficiency.

Excellence is never granted to man, but as the reward of labour.

Few have been taught to any purpose who have not been their own teachers.

The young mind is pliable and imitates, but in more advanced states grows rigid and must be warmed and softened before it will receive a deep impression.

He who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own, will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated.

Excellence is never granted to man but as the reward of labor. It argues no small strength of mind to persevere in habits of industry without the pleasure of perceiving those advances, which, like the hand of a clock, whilst they make hourly approaches to their point, yet proceed so slowly as to escape observation.