Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

Where words fail, music speaks.

Surely human affairs would be far happier if the power in men to be silent were the same as that to speak. But experience more than sufficiently teaches that men govern nothing with more difficulty than their tongues.

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.

A little knowledge that acts is worth infinitely more than much knowledge that is idle.

Opinion is the medium between knowledge and ignorance.

If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.

One cannot conceive anything so strange and so implausible that it has not already been said by one philosopher or another.

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.

There are few things more pathetic than those who have lost their curiosity and sense of adventure, and who no longer care to learn.

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

He was so learned that he could name a horse in nine languages; so ignorant that he bought a cow to ride on.

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.

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.

If you want a new idea, read an old book.

The highest activity a human being can attain is learning for understanding, because to understand is to be free.

Silence at the proper season is wisdom, and better than any speech.

Think lovingly, speak lovingly, act lovingly, and every need shall be supplied.

We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening a mob with the news that grass is green.

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

Man's tongue is soft, and bone doth lack; yet a stroke therewith may break a man's back.

Everything you say should be true but not everything true should be said.

The right to free speech is more important than the content of the speech.

Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.

Truly, to tell lies is not honorable; but when the truth entails tremendous ruin, to speak dishonorably is pardonable.