Houghton Academy

Donnie Stockin

Library (1989)

Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
-Theodore Roosevelt

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.
-John Milton, 1608-1674

The final test of every human system or institution is the kind of person it produces. -James Stalker, The Seven Cardinal Virtues

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.
-Sir Richard Steele, 1672

So tell me: to live in the atmosphere of these holy books, to think about them constantly, neither to know nor to look for anything beside them, is this not to live in the kingdom of heaven already, here on earth? -Jerome, priest and monk of Bethlehem

Story is the primary means we have for learning what the world is, and what it means to be a human being in it.
-Eugene Peterson, Leap Over a Wall, 4

This I learned from the shadow of a tree, That to and fro did sway upon a wall; My shadow self, my influence may fall Where I can never be. -Dwight M. Kitch

Where our work is, there let our joy be.
-Tertullian

Where you tend a rose, thistles cannot grow. -Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden