“We have been the recipients of the choicest bounties of Heaven; we have been preserved these many years in peace and prosperity; we have grown in numbers, wealth, and power. … But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious hand which preserved us in peace and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us, and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own. Intoxicated with unbroken success, we have become too self-sufficient to feel the necessity of redeeming and preserving grace, too proud to pray to the God that made us. (“A National Day of Fasting, Humiliation, and Prayer.” Proclamation March 30, 1863)”

“That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.”

“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander”

“I have been driven many times to my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

“When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on.”

“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.”

“I have destroyed my enemies when I make friends with them”

“Be sure you put your feet in the right place, then stand firm.”

“If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”

“It will not do to investigate the subject of religion too closely, as it is apt to lead to infidelity.”

“Education does not mean teaching people what they do not know. It means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.”

“With Malice Towards None”

“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.” 

“If this is coffee, please bring me some tea; but if this is tea, please bring me some coffee.”

“If we magnified our successes as much as we magnify our disappointments, we'd all be much happier”