Great Throughts Treasury

"It would be a great advantage to some schoolmasters if they would steal two hours a day from their pupils, and give their own minds the benefit of the robbery."

"Friends should be very delicate and careful in administering pity as medicine, when enemies use the same article as poison."

"If, in instructing a child, you are vexed with it for a want of adroitness, try, if you have never tried before, to write with your left hand, and then remember that a child is all left hand."

"It is vain to be always looking toward the future and never acting toward it."

"Strict punctuality is perhaps the cheapest virtue which can give force to an otherwise utterly insignificant character."

"There is scarcely a man who is not conscious of the benefits which his own mind has received from the performance of single acts of benevolence. How strange that so few of us try a course of the same medicine!"

"We should remember that it is quite as much a part of friendship to be delicate in its demands as to be ample in its performances."

"Where we find echoes, we generally find emptiness and hollowness; it is the contrary with the echoes of the heart."

"Sombre thoughts and fancies often require a little real soil or substance to flourish in; they are the dark pine-trees which take root in, and frown over the rifts of the scathed and petrified heart, and are chiefly nourished by the rain of unavailing tears, and the vapors of fancy."

"Those who, from the desire of our perfection, have the keenest eye for our faults generally compensate for it by taking a higher view of our merits than we deserve."