Let your holidays be associated with great public events, and they may be the life of patriotism as well as a source of relaxation and personal employment.

We should be as careful of the books we read, as of the company we keep. The dead very often have more power than the living.

The first step to improvement, whether mental, moral, or religious, is to know ourselves - our weaknesses, errors, deficiencies, and sins, that, by divine grace, we may overcome and turn from them all.

Credulity is belief in slight evidence, with no evidence, or against evidence.

To murder character is as truly a crime as to murder the body: the tongue of the slanderer is brother to the dagger of the assassin

Appreciation, whether of nature, or books, or art, or men, depends very much on temperament. What is beauty or genius or greatness to one, is far from being so to another.

Some persons are exaggerators by temperament. They do not mean untruth, but their feelings are strong, and their imaginations vivid, so that their statements are largely discounted by those of calm judgment and cooler temperament. They do not realize that we always weaken what we exaggerate.