National progress is the sum of individual industry, energy, and uprightness, as national decay is of individual idleness, selfishness, and vice.

No laws, however stringent, can make the idle industrious, the thriftless provident, or the drunken sober. Such reforms can only be effected by means of individual action, economy and self-denial; by better habits, rather than by greater rights.

For want of self-restraint many men are engaged all their lives in fighting with difficulties of their own making.

With will one can do anything.

Childhood is like a mirror, which reflects in after life the images first presented to it.

When typhus or cholera breaks out, they tell us that Nobody is to blame. That terrible Nobody! How much he has to answer for. More mischief is done by Nobody than by all the world besides.

It will generally be found that men who are constantly lamenting their ill luck are only reaping the consequences of their own neglect, mismanagement, and improvidence, or want of application.