The quote database

that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth

The happy and the powerful do not go into exile, and there are no surer guarantees of equality among men than poverty and misfortune.

Without diversion no joy, with diversion no sadness.

The very thing which is now the cause of thy great grief ought to have brought thee tranquillity.

This only will I say, that the most crushing of misfortune's burdens is, that as soon as a charge is fastened upon the unhappy, they are believed to have deserved their sufferings.

Moreover, the many dead trunks that stand like skeletons, never fail to give to these primeval woods a character of solemnity, absent in those of countries long civilized.

Suffering has been stronger than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart used to be

My heart is as dry as that spring sometimes proves in a thirsty August, when I revert to the space that is between us; a length of passage enough to render obsolete the phrases of our English letters before they can reach you.

Every man hath two birth-days: two days, at least, in every year, which set him upon revolving the lapse of time, as it affects his mortal duration.

Formerly, I thought that death was wearing out,--I stood ramparted about with so many healthy friends.

The partners, and the clerks, with whom I had for so many years, and for so many hours in each day of the year, been closely associated--being suddenly removed from them--they seemed as dead to me.

Men may die, but the fabrics of our free institutions remain unshaken.

For the fourth time the officer elected by the people and ordained by the Constitution to fill a vacancy so created is called to assume the Executive chair.

The wisdom of our fathers, foreseeing even the most dire possibilities, made sure that the Government should never be imperiled because of the uncertainty of human life.

Presently, after this was at an end, my mother died, and I was left at liberty to mourn her loss awhile.

To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.

The affectionate heart of my aunt, Catherine Porten, bewailed a sister and a friend; but my poor father was inconsolable, and the transport of grief seemed to threaten his life or his reason.

The unity of God preserves a unity in men--that is, a perpetual sympathy between man and man--which sympathy we must be subject to, if not in our joys, yet in our griefs.

Once I wished not to live, but the faculty of life seems to have sprung up in me again, from under the crushing foot of heavy grief.

If sorrow in its reaction makes us think of our friends, let my name come among the list of yours to you, and with it let the thought come that I am not the coldest and least sincere.

In our sorrow we see the rough side of the stuff; in our joys the smooth; and who shall say that when the taffeta is turned the most silk may not be in the sorrows?

There is only one event in my life which never loses its bitterness; which comes back on me like a retreating wave, going and coming again, which was and is my grief--I never had but one brother who loved and comprehended me.

When gone from hence, may nobody think of me again, except when one or two may think perhaps how I loved them

Such exclusion goes over 'the very brink of constitutional power' and falls into the ugly abyss of racism.

You have summoned me in my weakness; you must sustain me by your strength.