The great benefactors of individuals and of communities are the enlightened educators: the wise-teaching, mental and moral instructors and exemplars of our times. – Dorothea Dix
Life is not to be expended in vain regrets. No day, no hour, comes but brings in its train work to be performed for some useful end – the suffering to be comforted, the wandering led home, the sinner reclaimed. Oh! How can any fold the hands to rest and say to the spirit, ‘Take thine ease, for all is well!’ – Dorothea Dix
I shall be well enough when I get to Kentucky or Alabama. The tonic I need is the tonic of opposition. That always sets me on my feet. – Dorothea Dix
Those who do wrong very often think others are censuring them, when they are not even thought of. – Dorothea Dix
As you have learnt something of time, value and make a proper use of it. Once past, it knows no return; how necessary, then, that you spend it in improving your mind and fitting it for future happiness and usefulness. – Dorothea Dix
To me, the avocation of a teacher has something elevating and exciting. While surrounded by the young, one may always be doing good. – Dorothea Dix
Steady, firm, and kind government of prisoners is the truest humanity and the best exercise of duty. It is with convicts as with children: unseasonable indulgence, indiscreetly granted, leads to mischiefs which we may deplore but cannot repair. – Dorothea Dix
The lovely daisy, so justly celebrated by European poets, is not a native of our soil; we know it well, however, by cultivation in our gardens and green houses; besides, we are disposed to remember it for the sake of those who have sung its praises in immortal verse. – Dorothea Dix
If we had only those things which are procured with ease and freedom from danger, we should find the comforts and luxuries, if not many of the necessaries of life, considerably diminished. – Dorothea Dix
Nothing seems to me so likely to make people unhappy in themselves and at variance with others as the habit of killing time. – Dorothea Dix
In order to do good, a man must be good; and he will not be good except he have instruction by counsel and by example. – Dorothea Dix
Always remember those things that tend to strengthen and improve your understanding. You cannot learn without attention, neither retain those lessons that you have once learnt without frequently reflecting upon and reviewing them in your mind; by this means, things long past will remain impressed upon your memory. – Dorothea Dix
I have little taste for fashionable dissipations, cards, and dancing; the theatre and tea parties are my aversion, and I look with little envy on those who find their enjoyment in such transitory delights, if delights they may be called. – Dorothea Dix
I have had so much at heart. Defeated, not conquered; disappointed, not discouraged. I have but to be more energetic and more faithful in the difficult and painful vocation to which my life is devoted. – Dorothea Dix
Attention to any subject will in a short time render it attractive, be it ever so disagreeable and tedious at first. – Dorothea Dix
Why not, when it can be done without exposure or expense, let me rescue some of America’s miserable children from vice and guilt? – Dorothea Dix
What greater bliss than to look back on days spent in usefulness, in doing good to those around us. – Dorothea Dix
That statesman is indeed happy who can count as his friends the really honest and consistent, the true Patriots, and the men of honorable thought. – Dorothea Dix
The rose is the flower and handmaiden of love – the lily, her fair associate, is the emblem of beauty and purity. – Dorothea Dix
By all means, have you give great attention to your arithmetic, as its advantages are so many and important. – Dorothea Dix
I believe the best mode of aiding convicts is so to apportion their tasks in prison as to give to the industrious the opportunity of earning a sum for themselves by ‘over-work.’ A man usually values that most for which he has labored; he uses that most frugally which he has toiled hour by hour and day by day to acquire. – Dorothea Dix
Think how slow would be your progress in learning without printed books: you could study only manuscripts, and those necessarily must be very few in number. Learn from this to value your books, and always handle them with care. – Dorothea Dix
Society during the last hundred years has been alternately perplexed and encouraged respecting the two great questions: how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship? – Dorothea Dix
