HOSEA BALLOU

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Falsehood is cowardice, the truth courage.

Education commences at the mother's knee, and every word spoken within hearsay of little children tends toward the formation of character.

Preaching is to much avail, but practice is far more effective. A godly life is the strongest argument you can offer the skeptic.

Those who commit injustice bear the greatest burden.

Never be so brief as to become obscure.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Disease is the retribution of outraged Nature.

Real happiness is cheap enough, yet how dearly we pay for its counterfeit.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

Error is always more busy than truth.

Never let your zeal outrun your charity. The former is but human, the latter is divine.

Energy, like the biblical grain of the mustard-seed, will remove mountains.

There is no such things as 'best' in the world of individuals.

Tears of joy are like the summer rain drops pierced by sunbeams.

Exaggeration is a blood relation to falsehood and nearly as blamable.

Theories are always very thin and insubstantial, experience only is tangible.

Suspicion is far more to be wrong than right; more often unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.

No one has a greater asset for his business than a man's pride in his work.

Everything in the world exists to end up in a book.

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Doubt is the incentive to truth and inquiry leads the way.

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age.

Hatred is self-punishment.

A religion that requires persecution to sustain it is of the devil’s propagation.