When the destroyer comes, his first act will be to destroy all the books.

Why dost thou gaze upon the sky?O that I were yon spangled sphere!Then every star should be an eye,To wander o'er thy beauties here.

Nay, tempt me not to love again:There was a time when love was sweet;Dear Nea! had I known thee then,Our souls had not been slow to meet!But oh! this weary heart hath runSo many a time the rounds of pain,Not even for thee, thou lovely one!Would I endure such pangs again.

To the soul, there is hardly anything more healing than friendship.

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

Friend, be not afraid of thy office, thou sendest me to God.

By learning to discover and value our ordinariness, we nurture a friendliness toward ourselves and the world that is the essence of a healthy soul.

The ordinary acts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest.