“Folks are usually about as happy as they make their minds up to be.”

“If we take habitual drunkards as a class, their heads and hearts will bear an advantageous comparison with those of any other class.”

“Writing is the great invention of the world.”

“The written word may be man's greatest invention. It allows us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn.”

“In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.”

“No man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent.”

“If I am killed, I can die but once; but to live in constant dread of it, is to die over and over again.”

“The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read.”

“When I get ready to talk to people, I spend two thirds of the time thinking what they want to hear and one third thinking about what I want to say.”

“I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how a man could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.”

“I'm a success today because I had a friend who believed in me and I didn't have the heart to let him down.”

“Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation by others.”

“Your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other”

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.” 

“I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you can not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you will not.”