Let others laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in.

There is no college for the conscience.

The miraculous revelation of the Old Testament and the New, the miracles of famous men, Jews, Gentiles, or Christians, — then Franklin had no religion at all; and it would be an insult to say that he believed in the popular theology of his time, or of ours, for I find not a line from his pen indicating any such belief.

The books which help you most are those which make you think the most. The hardest way of learning is by easy reading; every man that tries it finds it so. But a great book that comes from a great thinker, — it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth, with beauty too.

The miser, starving his brother's body, starves also his own soul, and at death shall creep out of his great estate of injustice, poor and naked and miserable

There never was a great truth but it was reverenced; never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind.

No virtue fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn temperament, cautious by long experience, I yet never despair of human virtue.