Happily in this community we all are bred and born to work; and this honorable mark, set on us all, should bind together the various portions of the community. |
He is to be educated not because he's to make shoes, nails, and pins, but because he is a man. |
He who is false to the present duty breaks a thread in the loom, and you will see the effect when the weaving of a life-time is unraveled |
He who possesses the divine powers of the soul is a great being, be his place what it may. You may clothe him with rags, may immure him in a dungeon, may chain him to slavish tasks. But he is still great . . . . |
Health is the working man's fortune, and he ought to watch over it more than the capitalist over his largest investments. Health lightens the efforts of body and mind. It enables a man to crowd much work into a narrow compass. Without it, little can be earned, and that little by slow, exhausting toil. |
How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success. |
I affirm, and would maintain, that true religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being. |
I call that mind free which is not passively framed by outward circumstances, which is not swept away by the torrent of events, which is not the creature of accidental impulse, but which bends events to its own improvement, and acts from an inward spring, from immutable principles which it has deliberately espoused. |
I do and I must reverence human nature. I bless it for its kind affections. I honor it for its achievements in science and art, and still more for its examples of heroic and saintly virtue. These are marks of a divine origin and the pledges of a celestial inheritance; and I thank God that my own lot is bound up with that of the human race. |
I have expressed my strong interest in the mass of the people; and this is founded, not on their usefulness to the community, so much as on what they are in themselves.... Indeed every man (sic), in every condition, is great. It is only our own diseased sight which makes him little. A man is great as a man, be he where or what he may. The grandeur of his nature turns to insignificance all outward distinctions. |
Ideas are the mightiest influence on earth. One great thought breathed into a man may regenerate him. |
In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. |
Influence is to be measured, not by the extent of surface it covers, but by its kind. |
Innocent amusements are such as excite moderately, and such as produce a cheerful frame of mind, not boisterous mirth; such as refresh, instead of exhausting, the system; such as recur frequently, rather than continue long; such as send us back to our daily duties invigorated in body and spirit; such as we can partake of in the presence and society of respectable friends; such as consist with and are favorable to a grateful piety; such as are chastened by self-respect, and are accompanied with the consciousness that life has a higher end than to be amused. |
It [the soul] is truly an image of the infinity of God, and no words can do justice to its grandeur. |