“I proceed, gentlemen, to call your attention to the present state of insane persons confined within the commonwealth; in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens; chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.”

Brains are still unfashionable for women to wear, and it has always been proof of women’s superiority that the more intelligent a man is, the more women admire him, while the bigger fool a woman is, the more men run after her.

But the truth is the highest consideration.

Man is not made better by being degraded; he is seldom restrained from crime by harsh measures, except the principle of fear predominates in his character; and then he is never made radically better for its influence.

I have learned to live each day as it comes, and not to borrow trouble by dreading tomorrow.

Of all the calamities to which humanity is subject, none is so dreadful as insanity. … All experience shows that insanity seasonably treated is as certainly curable as a cold or a fever.

The tapestry of history has no point at which you can cut it and leave the design intelligible.

I think even lying on my bed I can still do something.

Man is not made better by being degraded.

A man usually values that most for which he has labored; he uses that most frugally which he has toiled hour by hour and day by day to acquire.

Be of good cheer, for sadness cannot heal the national wounds.

I have no particular love for my species, but own to an exhaustless fund of compassion.

Every evil has its good, and every ill an antidote.

It had long since come to my attention that people of accomplishment rarely sat back and let things happen to them. They went out and happened to things.

Pay attention to what you’re saying about yourself. You are prophesying your future.

All you have to do is to pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready, and if you can read the signs, you will learn everything you need to know in order to take the next step.

You will have bad times, but they will always wake you up to the stuff you weren’t paying attention to.

When we blather about trivial things, we ourselves become trivial, for our attention gets taken up with trivialities. You become what you give your attention to.

Winners don’t just learn the fundamentals, they master them. You have to monitor your fundamentals constantly because the only thing that changes will be your attention to them.

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

You were created on purpose for a purpose. There is a thirst and hunger in your heart that is real. Pay attention to it.