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If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he loves.

The pleasure of life is according to the man that lives it, and not according to the work or the place.

Human judgment is never unerring, and is rarely regarded as otherwise than wrong by the unsuccessful party in the contest.

Friends are often chosen for similitude of manners, and therefore each palliates the other's failings, because they are his own.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

To disappoint a friend is unpleasing; and he that forms expectations like yours, must be disappointed.

Work in moderation is healthy, as well as agreeable to the human constitution.

Very, very early in my boyhood I had acquired the habit of going about alone to amuse myself in my own way.

Rest and recreation are also necessary to his physical life.

A watched pot never boils.

It asks a troublesome effort to ensure the admiration of others: it is a still greater one to be satisfied with one's own thoughts.

Friendships are frequently taken up on some sudden sympathy, and we see only as much as we please of one another's characters afterwards.

There was a time when we were not: this gives us no concern--why, then, should it trouble us that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

The love of life, then, is an habitual attachment, not an abstract principle.

But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body.

The perfect man employs his mind as a mirror. It grasps nothing: it refuses nothing. It receives, but does not keep.

The pure men of old slept without dreams, and waked without anxiety.