“The aid that comes need not be money; let it be a careful consideration of the object, and an evident interest in the cause.

“When you aid a teacher, you improve the education of your children.  It is a wonder that teachers work as well as they do.  I never look at a group of them without using, mentally, the expression, ’The noble army of martyrs’!

“The chemist should have had a laboratory, and the observatory should have had an astronomer; but we are too apt to bestow money where there is no man, and to find a man where there is no money.

* * * * *

“If every girl who is aided were a very high order of scholar, scholarship would undoubtedly conquer poverty; but a large part of the aided students are ordinary.  They lack, at least, executive power, as their ancestors probably did.  Poverty is a misfortune; misfortunes are often the result of blamable indiscretion, extravagance, etc.

“It is one of the many blessings of poverty that one is not obliged to ‘give wisely.’”

1866. To her students: “I cannot expect to make astronomers, but I do expect that you will invigorate your minds by the effort at healthy modes of thinking....  When we are chafed and fretted by small cares, a look at the stars will show us the littleness of our own interests.

“...  But star-gazing is not science.  The entrance to astronomy is through mathematics.  You must make up your mind to steady and earnest work.  You must be content to get on slowly if you only get on thoroughly....

“The phrase ‘popular science’ has in itself a touch of absurdity.  That knowledge which is popular is not scientific.

“The laws which govern the motions of the sun, the earth, planets, and other bodies in the universe, cannot be understood and demonstrated without a solid basis of mathematical learning.

* * * * *

“Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.

* * * * *

“You cannot study anything persistently for years without becoming learned, and although I would not hold reputation up to you as a very high object of ambition, it is a wayside flower which you are sure to have catch at your skirts.

“Whatever apology other women may have for loose, ill-finished work, or work not finished at all, you will have none.

“When you leave Vassar College, you leave it the best educated women in the world.  Living a little outside of the college, beyond the reach of the little currents that go up and down the corridors, I think I am a fairer judge of your advantages than you can be yourselves; and when I say you will be the best educated women in the world, I do not mean the education of text-books, and class-rooms, and apparatus, only, but that broader education which you receive unconsciously, that higher teaching which comes to you, all unknown to the givers, from daily association with the noble-souled women who are around you.”