"It's queer how ready people always are with advice in any real or imaginary emergency, and no matter how many times experience has shown them to be wrong, they continue to set forth their opinions, as if they had received them from the Almighty!"

"We all like stories that make us cry. It's so nice to feel sad when you've nothing in particular to feel sad about."

"My heart is singing for joy this morning! A miracle has happened! The light of understanding has shone upon my little pupil's mind, and behold, all things are changed!"

"The truth is not wonderful enough to suit the newspapers; so they enlarge upon it, and invent ridiculous embellishments."

"I am beginning to suspect all elaborate and special systems of education. They seem to me to be built up on the supposition that every child is a kind of idiot who must be taught to think."

"Keep on beginning and failing. Each time you fail, start all over again, and you will grow stronger until you have accomplished a purpose - not the one you began with perhaps, but one you'll be glad to remember."

"I think that there are some teachers that do a very good job of incorporating culture and history. And there are some teachers who could use a little more help in that area."

"Children require guidance and sympathy far more than instruction."

"It's a great mistake, I think, to put children off with falsehoods and nonsense, when their growing powers of observation and discrimination excite in them a desire to know about things."

"People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved."

"I have thought about it a great deal, and the more I think, the more certain I am that obedience is the gateway through which knowledge, yes, and love, too, enter the mind of the child."