“It's a strange paradox that a man gifted with too many talents can fritter them all away without developing a single one to its full.”

“When one has talent, everything contributes to its development.”

“It's wicked to throw away so many good gifts because you can't have the one you want.”

“Strange are the pictures of the future that mankind can thus draw with this brush of faith and these many-coloured pigments of the imagination! Strange, too, that no one of them tallies with another!”

“Must the interest of life wane for us all as the progress of knowledge curtails the playground of imagination? No doubt it must in some measure, but there is another cause.I believe that in these days we have too many occupations, too many interests; we know too many things, and, if you will, have too many advantages and facilities. Our faculty of taking an interest is dissipated and frittered away.”

“Education, human education, is the leading out and lifting up of the soul into the ripe, full enjoyment of all its powes potential. To educate men and women is to put them in full command of themselves, to completely possess them of their faculties, which are only half possessed until they are educated. Education imparts nothing but discipline and development. It does not increase the number of man's original talents; it adds nothing to the sum of his inherent capabilities; but it improves those talents, it develops and strengthens those capabilities, brightening what is dull, making the crude fine, the clumsy skillful, the small great, and the great still greater. Education supplements creation, and moves next to it in the order of infinite progression.”