Quotes from Dorothea Dix

Time passed solely in the pursuit of pleasure leaves no solid enjoyment for the future; but from the hours you spend in reading and studying useful books, you will gather a golden harvest in future years.

There is, in our nature, a disposition to indulgence, a secret desire to escape from labor, which, unless hourly combated, will overcome and destroy the best faculties of our minds and paralyze our most useful powers.

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.

What greater bliss than to look back on days spent in usefulness, in doing good to those around us.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing seems to me so likely to make people unhappy in themselves and at variance with others as the habit of killing time.

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.

There is, I think, great difficulty in writing of one's self: it is almost impossible to present subjects where the chief actor must be conspicuous and not seem to be, or really be, egotistical.

The rose is the flower and handmaiden of love - the lily, her fair associate, is the emblem of beauty and purity.

By all means, have you give great attention to your arithmetic, as its advantages are so many and important.

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.

The fact is that, in all prisons everywhere, cruelties on the one hand and injudicious laxity of discipline on the other have at times appeared and will, at intervals, be renewed except the most vigilant oversight is maintained.

The French, perhaps more than any other nation, cherish the memory of their dead by ornamenting their places of sepulture with the finest flowers, often renewing the garlands and replacing such plants as decay with vigorous and costly ones.

A virtuous character is likened to an unblemished flower. Piety is a fadeless bud that half opens on earth and expands through eternity. Sweetness of temper is the odor of fresh blooms, and the amaranth flowers of pure affection open but to bloom forever.