“We shall need all the anti-slavery feeling in the country, and more; you can go home and try to bring the people to your views, and you may say anything you like about me, if that will help... When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost my life.”

“A capacity, and taste, for reading, gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others. It is the key, or one of the keys, to the already solved problems. And not only so. It gives a relish, and facility, for successfully pursuing the [yet] unsolved ones.”

“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.” 

“My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.”

“If Friendship is your weakest point, you are the strongest person in the world.”

“But for this book we could not know right from wrong.”

“I was a little cross.I ask pardon. If I do get up a little temper I have no sufficient time to keep it up.”

“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.”

“Believing everyone is dangerous, but believing nobody is more dangerous.”

“Truth is generally the best vindication against slander”

“I do the very best I know how, the very best I can, and I mean to keep on doing so until the end.”

“Let no feeling of discouragement prey upon you, and in the end you  are sure to succeed.”

“The hen is the wisest of all the animal creation, because she never cackles until the egg is laid.”

“Determine that the thing can and shall be done and then... find the way.”

“A house divided cannot stand.”