82 Quotes by Dorothea Dix

Men need knowledge in order to overpower their passions and master their prejudices.

Indulged habits of dependence create habits of indolence, and indolence opens the portal to petty errors, to many degrading habits, and to vice and crime with their attendant train of miseries.

Rules must be established and enforced, and, as numbers are increased in prisons, the necessity for vigilance increases. These rules, let it be understood, may be kindly while firmly enforced. I would never suffer any exhibition of ill-temper or an arbitrary exercise of authority.

Floral emblems have been often adopted. The houses of York and Lancaster had their roses, the Bourbons of France, the fleur-de-lis, Scotland her thistle, and Ireland her shamrock.

What an enthusiastic devotion is that which sends a man from the attractions of home, the ties of neighbourhood, the bonds of country, to range plains, valleys, hills, mountains, for a new flower.

What child has ever known the country and has not twined hundreds of fragrant wreaths with the yellow shining cowslip and the more frail and delicate violet - mingling here and there green leaves culled from the odorous eglantine, or, as we more commonly call it, sweetbriar.

The fabled origin of the laurel is this. Daphne, daughter of the river Peneus, offended by the persecutions of Apollo, implored succour of the gods, who changed her into a laurel tree. Apollo crowned his head with the leaves and ordered that forever after, the tree should be sacred to him.

No blessing, no good, can follow in the path trodden by slavery.

I am contracting continually a debt of gratitude which time will never see canceled. There is a treasury from which it will be repaid, but I do not dispense its stores.