The best effect of any book is that it excites the reader to self activity.

A sad spectacle. If they be inhabited, what a scope for misery and folly. If they be not inhabited, what a waste of space.

Nine-tenths of the miseries and vices of mankind proceed from idleness.

A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and with the man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby. The man is now a man.

Infinite is the help man can yield to man.

All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble; work is alone noble.

The dust of controversy is merely the falsehood flying off.