Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes. Nothing can teach us better than our understanding of them. This is one of the best ways of self-education.

Natural abilities are like natural plants, that need pruning by study; and studies themselves do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience.

As an apple is not in any proper sense an apple until it is ripe, so a human being is not in any proper sense a human being until he is educated.

Educate the children and it won’t be necessary to punish the men.

Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

I roamed the countryside searching for answers to things I did not understand.

Any fool can know. The point is to understand.

The solution to adult problems tomorrow depends on large measure upon how our children grow up today.

College isn't the place to go for ideas.

All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.

The truth is always exciting. Speak it, then. Life is dull without it.

The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.

We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office.

I have met men who are habitual liars. They have lied so long that they no longer can distinguish between the truth and a lie. Their sensitivity to sin has been almost completely deadened.