– Words of Wisdom –

What is to be will be and no cares of ours can arrest the decree.

—Lincoln’s often repeated “maxim and philosophy” as recalled by Mary Todd Lincoln, from her interview with William H. Herndon, September 1866, as quoted in Lincoln as I Knew Him edited by Harold Holzer

You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.

—Remark widely attributed to Lincoln, first reported in Lincoln’s Yarn’s & Stories by A. McClure in 1904

Do good to those who hate you and turn their ill will to friendship.

—frequent remark of Lincoln's recalled by Mary Todd Lincoln from her interview with William H. Herndon, September 1866, as quoted in Lincoln as I Knew Him edited by Harold Holzer

When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind, unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and a true maxim, that a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.

—Address on Temperance, Springfield, Illinois, February 22, 1842

You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather than harm.

—Letter to General Joseph Hooker, January 26, 1863

I know not how to aid you, save in the assurance of one of mature age, and much severe experience, that you can not fail, if you resolutely determine, that you will not.

—Letter to George C. Latham, a friend of Robert Lincoln’s, whom Lincoln wrote to encourage when Latham was rejected by Harvard University, July 22, 1860

I believe it is an established maxim in morals that he who makes an assertion without knowing whether it is true or false, is guilty of falsehood; and the accidental truth of the assertion, does not justify or excuse him.

—Letter to Allen N. Ford, August 11, 1846

Better give your path to a dog, than be bitten by him in contesting for the right. Even killing the dog would not cure the bite.

—Letter to James M. Cutts, Jr., captain in Union army who had been court martialled for arguing with a fellow officer

I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot.

—Remarks at the Monogahela House, February 14, 1861, from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume IV

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: ‘And this, too, shall pass away.’ How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction!

—Address before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, September 30, 1859