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There is always work, and tools to work withal, for those, who will.
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You never know till you try to reach them how accessible men are; but you must approach each man by the right door.
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There is a power in the human mind ... to see things as they are ... but there is equally a power to see things as they might be.
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The hunger of the eye is not to be despised; and they are to be pitied who have starvation of the eye.
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The meanest thing in the world is the devil.
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Happiness is not the end of life: character is.
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Good nature is worth more than knowledge, more than money, more than honor, to the persons who possess it.
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Boys have their soft and gentle moods too. You would suppose by the morning racket that nothing could be more foreign to their nature than romance and vague sadness. . . . But boys have hours of great sinking and sadness, when kindness and fondness are peculiarly needful to them.
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All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can't be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.
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Next to victory, there is nothing so sweet as defeat, if only the right adversary overcomes you.
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The strength of a man consists in finding out the way God is going, and going that way.
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Laughter is day, and sobriety is night; a smile is the twilight that hovers gently between both, more bewitching than either.
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Defeat is a school in which truth always grows strong.
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A man without ambition is worse than dough that has no yeast in it to raise it.
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They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.
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Even a liar tells a hundred truths to one lie; he has to, to make the lie good for anything.
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Sink the Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and man's obligations to God would be unchanged. He would have the same path to tread, only his lamp and his guide would be gone; he would have the same voyage to make, but his chart and compass would be overboard!
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It is one of the worst effects of prosperity to make a man a vortex instead of a fountain; so that, instead of throwing out, he learns only to draw in.
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It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.
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Good-humor makes all things tolerable.
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There can be no barrenness in full summer. The very sand will yield something. Rocks will have mosses, and every rift will have its wind-flower, and every crevice a leaf; while from the fertile soil will be reared a gorgeous troop of growths, that will carry their life in ten thousand forms, but all with praise to God. And so it is when the soul knows its summer. Love redeems its weakness, clothes its barrenness, enriches its poverty, and makes its very desert to bud and blossom as the rose.
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There are many troubles which you cannot cure by the Bible and the hymn-book, but which you can cure by a good perspiration and a breath of fresh air.
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Think of a man in a chronic state of anger!
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A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation's flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself.