“I have been driven many times upon my knees by the overwhelming conviction that I had no where else to go. My own wisdom and that of all about me seemed insufficient for that day.”

“It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words, "And this too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!”

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”

“I shall adopt new Muse as fast as they appear to be true Muse.”

“To believe in the things you can see and touch is no belief at all - but to believe in the unseen is a triumph and a blessing.”

“You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.”

“And having thus chosen our course, without guile, and with pure purpose, let us renew our trust in GOD, and go forward without fear, and with manly hearts.

“Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.”

“My concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.”

“Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.”

“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.” 

“The most altruistic man is the most selfish.”

“People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

“A woman is the only thing I am afraid of that I know will not hurt me.”

“Get books, sit yourself down anywhere, and go to reading them yourself.”