It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a real father.

Be slow in choosing a friend, slower in changing.

Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.

The first mistake in public business is the going into it.

Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

Applause waits on success.

One today is worth two tomorrows.

A place for everything, everything in its place.

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

Beauty and folly are old companions.

Do not fear mistakes. You will know failure. Continue to reach out.

Beware of little expenses. A small leak will sink a great ship.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones.

Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom - and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech.

Well done is better than well said.

By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.

Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.

I have never entered into any controversy in defense of my philosophical opinions; I leave them to take their chance in the world. If they are right, truth and experience will support them; if wrong, they ought to be refuted and rejected. Disputes are apt to sour one's temper and disturb one's quiet.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Genius without education is like silver in the mine.

The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself.

Marriage is the most natural state of man, and... the state in which you will find solid happiness.

Money has never made man happy, nor will it, there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more of it one has the more one wants.

The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself.

All who think cannot but see there is a sanction like that of religion which binds us in partnership in the serious work of the world.

We are more thoroughly an enlightened people, with respect to our political interests, than perhaps any other under heaven. Every man among us reads, and is so easy in his circumstances as to have leisure for conversations of improvement and for acquiring information.

If you would be loved, love, and be loveable.

Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75.

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.

Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.

God works wonders now and then; Behold a lawyer, an honest man.

God helps those who help themselves.

Half a truth is often a great lie.

A great empire, like a great cake, is most easily diminished at the edges.

Take time for all things: great haste makes great waste.

It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

There never was a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.

There is no kind of dishonesty into which otherwise good people more easily and frequently fall than that of defrauding the government.

Laws too gentle are seldom obeyed; too severe, seldom executed.

Where there is a free government, and the people make their own laws by their representatives, I see no injustice in their obliging one another to take their own paper money.

Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.

We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.

The doorstep to the temple of wisdom is a knowledge of our own ignorance.

God grant that not only the love of liberty but a thorough knowledge of the rights of man may pervade all the nations of the earth, so that a philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its surface and say: 'This is my country.'

You may delay, but time will not.

Time is money.

Lost time is never found again.

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.