Why not, when it can be done without exposure or expense, let me rescue some of America's miserable children from vice and guilt?
I shall try and effect all that is before me to perform; and God, I think, will surely give me strength for His work so long as He directs my line of duty.
That statesman is indeed happy who can count as his friends the really honest and consistent, the true Patriots, and the men of honorable thought.
I worship talents almost. I sinfully dare mourn that I possess them not.
I would be cautious in embracing or rejecting doctrines. Had they been essential to our salvation, they would have been more explicitly declared in the Gospels, where we are so well taught the practice of every good word and work.
There is, I think, great difficulty in writing of one's self: it is almost impossible to present subjects where the chief actor must be conspicuous and not seem to be, or really be, egotistical.
Nothing seems to me so likely to make people unhappy in themselves and at variance with others as the habit of killing time.
Think how slow would be your progress in learning without printed books: you could study only manuscripts, and those necessarily must be very few in number. Learn from this to value your books, and always handle them with care.
By all means, have you give great attention to your arithmetic, as its advantages are so many and important.
It is of no use to commit whole pages to memory, merely to recite them once without hesitation; you must think of the meaning more than the words - of the ideas more than the language.
If we had only those things which are procured with ease and freedom from danger, we should find the comforts and luxuries, if not many of the necessaries of life, considerably diminished.
The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.
The French, perhaps more than any other nation, cherish the memory of their dead by ornamenting their places of sepulture with the finest flowers, often renewing the garlands and replacing such plants as decay with vigorous and costly ones.
The capsules of the geranium furnish admirable barometers. Fasten the beard, when fully ripe, upon a stand, and it will twist itself or untwist, according as the air is moist or dry.
What child has ever known the country and has not twined hundreds of fragrant wreaths with the yellow shining cowslip and the more frail and delicate violet - mingling here and there green leaves culled from the odorous eglantine, or, as we more commonly call it, sweetbriar.
The fabled origin of the laurel is this. Daphne, daughter of the river Peneus, offended by the persecutions of Apollo, implored succour of the gods, who changed her into a laurel tree. Apollo crowned his head with the leaves and ordered that forever after, the tree should be sacred to him.
I am contracting continually a debt of gratitude which time will never see canceled. There is a treasury from which it will be repaid, but I do not dispense its stores.
All my habits through life have been singularly removed from any condition of reliance on others, and the feeling - right or wrong - that aloneness is my proper position has prevailed since my early childhood, no doubt nourished and strengthened by many and quick-following bereavements.
Of my English friends, I should find language too poor to speak the just praise and the excellence which shines in their characters and lives.
They say, 'Nothing can be done here!' I reply, 'I know no such word in the vocabulary I adopt!'
