First find the man in yourself if you will inspire manliness in others.
— Amos Bronson Alcott
Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength, not my weakness.
Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.
Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.
A true teacher defends his students against his own personal influences.
Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament, and this paradise is not secure until children appear to animate and complete the picture.
Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.
To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.
Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly.
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples.
One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
Where there is a mother in the home, matters go well.
Our ideals are our better selves.
Our dreams drench us in sense, and sense steeps us again in dreams.
To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.
That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
Who knows, the mind has the key to all things besides.
The less routine the more life.
A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.
Debate is masculine, conversation is feminine.
While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot feel old, no matter what his years may be.
