Donald G. Mitchell

“You grow up however, unfortunately, as the college years fly by, into a very exaggerated sense of your own capacities.”

“The way of a man's heart will be foreshadowed by what goodness lies in him - coming from above, and from around; but a way foreshadowed is not a way made.”

“In the vanity of self-consciousness one feels at a long remove above the ordinary love and trustfulness of a simple and pure heart.”

“Determine to become one of the best. Sufficient money will almost automatically follow if you get to be one of the 'best' in your chosen field, whatever it is.”

“The future is wider than vision, and has no end.”

“I care not how worldly you may be: there are times when all distinctions seem like dust, and when at the graves of the great you dream of a coming country, where your proudest hopes shall be dimmed forever.”

“The sparrow that is twittering on the edge of my balcony is calling up to me this moment a world of memories that reach over half my lifetime, and a world of hope that stretches farther than any flight of sparrows.”

“I love better to count time from spring to spring; it seems to me far more cheerful to reckon the year by blossoms than by blight.”

“Youth is in a grand flush, like the hot days of ending summer; and pleasant dreams thrall your spirit, like the smoky atmosphere that bathes the landscape of an August day.”

“But wealth is a great means of refinement; and it is a security for gentleness, since it removes disturbing anxieties.”

“Married or unmarried, young or old, poet or worker, you are still a dreamer, and will one time know, and feel, that your life is but a dream.”

“There is no genius in life like the genius of energy and industry.”

“No man's brain is so dull, and no man's eye so blind, that they cannot catch food for dreams.”

“I thank Heaven every summer's day of my life, that my lot was humbly cast within the hearing of romping brooks, and beneath the shadow of oaks.”