“Books, like friends, should be few and well chosen. Like friends, too, we should return to them again and again for, like true friends, they will never fail us – never cease to instruct – never cloy.”

The worst thing that can be said of the most powerful is that they can take your life; but the same can be said of the most weak.

A public debt is a kind of anchor in the storm; but if the anchor be too heavy for the vessel, she will be sunk by that very weight which was intended for her preservation.

We hate some persons because we do not know them; and will not know them because we hate them.

To admit that there is any such thing as chance, in the common acceptation of the term, would be to attempt to establish a power independent of God.

A house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.

We are more inclined to hate one another for points on which we differ, than to love one another for points on which we agree.

Time is the most undefinable yet paradoxical of things; the past is gone, the future is not come, and the present becomes the past, even while we attempt to define it.

Bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret.

Immitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Diffidence is the better part of knowledge.

Justice to my readers compels me to admit that I write because I have nothing to do; justice to myself induces me to add that I will cease to write the moment I have nothing to say.

War is a game in which princes seldom win, the people never.

When you have nothing to say, say nothing.

A power above all human responsibility ought to be above all human attainment.

God is as great in minuteness as He is in magnitude.

The acquirements of science maybe termed the armor of the mind.

With a smile we should instruct our youth.

Beware of those who attribute petty instructions to God.

Practical wisdom is only to be learned in the school of experience. Precepts and instruction are useful so far as they go, but, without the discipline of real life, they remain of the nature of theory only.

A fig-tree looking on a fig-tree becometh fruitful,” says the Arabian proverb. And so it is with children; their first great instructor is example.

But I marvel when I observe these men setting themselves up as instructors of youth who cannot see that they are applying the analogy of an art with hard and fast rules to a creative process

If you be a lover of instruction, you will be well instructed.

They are in a sense abused by the medical procedures that are performed without quality medical instructions/information. It’s a tragic place.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.