Happy are those who dwell apart from the harrowing tumults of public life!
I was early taught by sorrow to shed tears, and now when sudden joy lights up, or any unexpected sorrow strikes my heart, I find it difficult to repress the full and swelling tide of feeling.
To me, the avocation of a teacher has something elevating and exciting. While surrounded by the young, one may always be doing good.
Pleasures take to themselves wings and fly away; true knowledge remains forever.
Indulged habits of dependence create habits of indolence, and indolence opens the portal to petty errors, to many degrading habits, and to vice and crime with their attendant train of miseries.
Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.
Attention to any subject will in a short time render it attractive, be it ever so disagreeable and tedious at first.
I must study alone, as I am condemned to do every thing alone, I believe, in this life.
Those who do wrong very often think others are censuring them, when they are not even thought of.
With care and patience, people may accomplish things which, to an indolent person, would appear impossible.
What an enthusiastic devotion is that which sends a man from the attractions of home, the ties of neighbourhood, the bonds of country, to range plains, valleys, hills, mountains, for a new flower.
My happiest hours are spent in school, surrounded by those I hope to benefit.
Steady, firm, and kind government of prisoners is the truest humanity and the best exercise of duty. It is with convicts as with children: unseasonable indulgence, indiscreetly granted, leads to mischiefs which we may deplore but cannot repair.
'Know,' says a wise writer, the historian of kings, 'Know the men that are to be trusted'; but how is this to be? The possession of knowledge involves both time and opportunities. Neither of these are 'handservants at command.'
My wish is to be known only thru my work.
Floral emblems have been often adopted. The houses of York and Lancaster had their roses, the Bourbons of France, the fleur-de-lis, Scotland her thistle, and Ireland her shamrock.
The lovely daisy, so justly celebrated by European poets, is not a native of our soil; we know it well, however, by cultivation in our gardens and green houses; besides, we are disposed to remember it for the sake of those who have sung its praises in immortal verse.
There is, in our nature, a disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which, unless hourly combated, will overcome and destroy the best faculties of our minds and paralyze our most useful powers.
As you have learnt something of time, value and make a proper use of it. Once past, it knows no return; how necessary, then, that you spend it in improving your mind and fitting it for future happiness and usefulness.
I have little taste for fashionable dissipations, cards, and dancing; the theatre and tea parties are my aversion, and I look with little envy on those who find their enjoyment in such transitory delights, if delights they may be called.
