God be thanked for books; they are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages.

Do anything rather than give yourself to reverie.

O God, animate us to cheerfulness! May we have a joyful sense of our blessings, learn to look on the bright circumstances of our lot, and maintain a perpetual contentedness

The spirit of liberty is not merely, as multitudes imagine, a jealousy of our own particular rights, but a respect for the rights of others, and an unwillingness that any man, whether high or low, should be wronged and trampled under foot.

I call that mind free which jealously guards its intellectual rights and powers, which calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come, which receives new truth as an angel from Heaven.

Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind.

Let every man, if possible, gather some good books under his roof.