“I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.”

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”

“Nothing can work damage to me except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me and never am a real sufferer except by my own fault.”

“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me, or reject; and on his word, or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing.”

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

“I confess myself utterly at a loss in suggesting particular reforms in our ways of teaching. No discretion that can be lodged with a school-committee, with the overseers or visitors of an academy, of a college, can at all avail to reach these difficulties and perplexities, but they solve themselves when we leave institutions and address individuals.”

“Some of your griefs you have cured,And the sharpest you still have survived,But what torments of grief you've enduredFrom evils that never arrived.”