I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.

Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.

It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval.

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

Man proposes, but God blocks the game.