“Words of praise, indeed, are almost as necessary to warm a child into a genial life as acts of kindness and affection. Judicious praise is to children what the sun is to flowers.”

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man’s life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.

It is our relation to circumstances that determine their influence over us. The same wind that blows one ship into port may blow another off shore.

There is no tyrant like custom, and no freedom where its edicts are not resisted.

Wit never appears to greater advantage than when it is successfully exerted to relieve from a dilemma, palliate a deficiency, or cover a retreat.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

When we get tired of enjoying all the pleasures within our reach, we have still a resource in thinking of others that are not.

Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire.

The cheerful live longest in years, and afterwards in our regards. Cheerfulness is the off-shoot of goodness.

The passions are like fire, useful in a thousand ways and dangerous only in one, through their excess.

Winter is the night of vegetation.

A profusion of fancies and quotations is out of place in a love-letter. True feeling is always direct, and never deviates into by-ways to cull flowers of rhetoric.

What we call conscience in many instances, is only a wholesome fear of the law.

Yes I do like children, Girl children, about eighteen or twenty.

I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.

I think you should be a child for as long as you can. I have been successful for 74 years being able to do that.

I have always been the kid who’s asked ‘Why?’ In my faith, you’re just supposed to have faith. But I was always like, why?

Above all, except the wife and children, I want to see my books.

All Children Have Brain Damage!

Your children need your presence more than your presents.

Don’t limit a child to your own learning, for she was born in another time.