“You can’t make a weak man strong by making a strong man weak”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren't very new after all.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“In your temporary failure there is no evidence that you may not yet be a better scholar, and a more successful man in the great struggle of life, than many others, who have entered college more easily.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to "preserve, protect, and defend it." I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“I have seen your dispatch expressing your unwillingness to break your hold where you are. Neither am I willing. Hold on with a bulldog grip, and chew and choke...”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“Character is like a tree and reputation its shadow. The shadow is what we think it is and the tree is the real thing.”
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Abraham Lincoln
“I belive that people should fight for what they believe and only what they believe.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“I shall adopt new Muse as fast as they appear to be true Muse.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
“I remember my mother's prayers and they have always followed me. They have clung to me all my life.”
―
Abraham Lincoln
