Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify; but, nine times out of ten, the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for himself.  In all my acquaintance, I never knew a man to be drowned who was worth the saving.

If the power to do hard work is not talent, it is the best possible substitute for it.

We can not study nature profoundly without bringing ourselves into communion with the spirit of art which pervades and fills the universe.

If there be one thing upon this earth that mankind love and admire better than another, it is a brave man; it is a man who dares to look the devil in the face and tell him he is a devil.

It is one of the precious mysteries of sorrow that it finds solace in unselfish thought.

Every character is the joint product of nature and nurture.

It has been fortunate that most of our greatest men have left no descendants to shine in the borrowed luster of a great name.

An uncertain currency, that goes up and down, hits the laborer, and hits him hard.  It helps him last and hurts him first.

We no longer attribute the untimely death of infants to the sin of Adam, but to bad nursing and ignorance.

The granite hills are not so changeless and abiding as the restless sea.

In their struggle with the forces of nature, the ability to labor was the richest patrimony of the colonists.

Coercion is the basis of every law in the universe—­human or divine.  A law is no law without coercion behind it.

For the noblest man who lives there still remains a conflict.

We hold reunions, not for the dead; for there is nothing in all the earth that you and I can do for the dead.  They are past our help and past our praise.  We can add to them no glory, we can give them no immortality.  They do not need us, but for ever and for evermore we need them.

Throughout the whole web of national existence we trace the golden thread of human progress toward a higher and better estate.

Heroes did not make our liberties, but they reflected and illustrated them.

After all, territory is but the body of a nation.  The people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit, its life.  In them dwells its hope of immortality.  Among them, if anywhere, are to be found its chief elements of destruction.

It matters little what may be the forms of national institution if the life, freedom, and growth of society are secured.

Finally, our great hope for the future—­our great safeguard against danger—­is to be found in the general and thorough education of our people, and in the virtue which accompanies such education.

The germ of our political institutions, the primary cell from which they were evolved, was in the New England town, and the vital force, the informing soul, of the town was the town meeting, which, for all local concerns, was kings, lords, and commons in all.