"When with all thy heart thou strivest to live with truth and love, couldst thou do anything better? … If this be thy life, thou shalt not deem it a misfortune to lack the things men most crave and toil for."

"Agitators and declaimers may heat the blood, but they do not illumine the mind."

"Be content that others have position, if thou hast ability: that others have riches, if thou hast virtue."

"Wouldst thou bestow some precious gift upon thy fellows, make thyself a noble man."

"They who think they know all, learn nothing."

"If we are disappointed that men give little heed to what we utter is it for their sake or our own?"

"The best money can procure for thee is freedom to live in thy true self. It is more apt however to enslave than to liberate. It is good also when thou makest it a means to help thy fellow men; but here too it is easier to harm than to benefit: for the money thou givest another is useful to him only when it stimulates him to self-activity."

"If the young are watched too closely, if they are kept habitually under surveillance, the spring of action is weakened, the power of initiative is destroyed, and they become mediocre, commonplace, mechanical men and women, from whom nothing excellent or distinguished may be expected. Parents and teachers … must so deal with the young as to bring them little by little under the control of reason and conscience; and in this, nothing thwarts more surely than excessive supervision, for it draws attention from the inner view and voice to the eyes of the watchers. It may cultivate a love of decency and propriety, but not the creative feeling that we live with God and that righteousness is life."

"If thy friends tire of thee, remember that it is human to tire of everything."

"What we think out for ourselves forms channels in which other thoughts will flow."

"We are not masters of the truth which is borne in upon us: it overpowers us."

"It is the expensiveness of our pleasures that makes the world poor and keeps us poor in ourselves. If we could but learn to find enjoyment in the things of the mind, the economic problems would solve themselves."

"A hobby is the result of a distorted view of things. It is putting a planet in the place of a sun."

"It is the business of the teacher … to fortify reason and to make conscience sovereign."

"The study of science, dissociated from that of philosophy and literature, narrows the mind and weakens the power to love and follow the noblest ideals: for the truths which science ignores and must ignore are precisely those which have the deepest bearing on life and conduct."

"Thought from which no emotion springs is sterile. The knowledge that has no bearing on the conduct of life is vain."

"The more we live with what we imagine others think of us, the less we live with truth."

"To cultivate the memory we should confide to it only what we understand and love: the rest is a useless burden; for simply to know by rote is not to know at all."

"We do not find it hard to bear with ourselves, though we are full of faults. Why then may we not learn to be tolerant of others?"

"If we fail to interest, whether because we are dull and heavy, or because our hearers are so, we teach in vain."

"What a wise man knows seems so plain and simple to himself that he easily makes the mistake of thinking it to be so for others."

"In education, as in religion and love, compulsion thwarts the purpose for which it is employed."

"Inferior thinking and writing will make a name for a man among inferior people, who in all ages and countries, are the majority."

"The aim of education is to strengthen and multiply the powers and activities of the mind rather than to increase its possessions."

"We shrink from the contemplation of our dead bodies, forgetting that when dead they are no longer ours, and concern us as little as the hairs that have fallen from our heads."

"Where it is the chief aim to teach many things, little education is given or received."

"A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection."

"Believe in no triumph which is won by the deadening of human faculty or the dwarfing of human life. Strive for truth and love, not for victory."

"Exercise of body and exercise of mind are supplementary, and both may be made recreative and educative."

"We have no sympathy with those who are controlled by ideas and passions which we neither understand nor feel. Thus they who live to satisfy the appetites do not believe it possible to live in and for the soul."

"One may speak Latin and have but the mind of a peasant."

"They whom trifles distract and nothing occupies are but children."

"We do not see rightly until we learn to eliminate what we expect or wish to see from what we really see."

"As children must have the hooping cough, the college youth must pass through the stage of conceit in which he holds in slight esteem the wisdom of the best."

"As a brave man goes into fire or flood or pestilence to save a human life, so a generous mind follows after truth and love, and is not frightened from the pursuit by danger or toil or obloquy."

"There is some lack either of sense or of character in one who becomes involved in difficulties with the worthless or the vicious."

"The test of the worth of a school is not the amount of knowledge it imparts, but the self-activity it calls forth."

"Each individual bears within himself an ideal man, and to bring him forth in perfect form is his divinely imposed life-work."

"He who leaves school, knowing little, but with a longing for knowledge, will go farther than one who quits, knowing many things, but not caring to learn more."

"More inspiring and interesting teaching alone can make progress in education possible: for such teaching alone has power to produce greater self-activity, greater concentration of mind, greater desire to learn not only how to get a living, but how to live."

"It is the business of culture to make us able to consider with intelligent interest all real opinions, even those we do not and can not accept."

"Folly will run its course and it is the part of wisdom not to take it too seriously."

"If our opinions rest upon solid ground, those who attack them do not make us angry, but themselves ridiculous."

"As we can not love what is hateful, let us accustom ourselves neither to think nor to speak of disagreeable things and persons."

"It is the tendency of the study of science to make us patient, humble and attentive to the smallest things. Is not this part of religion?"

"In giving us dominion over the animal kingdom God has signified His will that we subdue the beast within ourselves."

"The disinterested love of truth which culture fosters is akin to the unselfishness which is a characteristic of the good."

"To think of education as a means of preserving institutions however excellent, is to have a superficial notion of its end and purpose, which is to mould and fashion men who are more than institutions, who create, outgrow, and re-create them."

"To think profoundly, to seek and speak truth, to love justice and denounce wrong is to draw upon one’s self the ill will of many."

"As the savages whom we have instructed are ready when left to themselves to return to their ancestral mode of life, so our young people quickly forget what they have learned at school, and sink back into the commonplace existence from which a right education would have saved them."