The best cure for worry, depression, melancholy, brooding, is to go deliberately forth and try to lift with one's sympathy the gloom of somebody else.

I will never cease advising my friends and enemies to read poetry before anything.

You are not in charge of the universe; you are in charge of yourself.

Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.

Happiness includes chiefly the idea of satisfaction after full honest effort. No one can possibly be satisfied and no one can be happy who feels that in some paramount affairs he failed to take up the challenge of life.

Every scene, even the commonest, is wonderful, if only one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time; in its right, authentic colors; without making comparisons. Cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely, simply, artlessly, ignorantly; of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself and tarnishes by the present no remembrance of the past.

The proper, wise balancing of one's whole life may depend upon the feasibility of a cup of tea at an unusual hour.