Wise sayings often fall on barren ground, but a kind word is never thrown away.

Having once decided to achieve a certain task, achieve it at all costs of tedium and distaste. The gain in self confidence of having accomplished a tiresome labor is immense.

Always say a kind word if you can, if only that it may come in, perhaps, with singular opportuneness, entering some mournful man's darkened room, like a beautiful firefly, whose happy circumvolutions he cannot but watch, forgetting his many troubles.

We are not so easily guided by our most prominent weaknesses as by those of which we are least aware.

When we consider the incidents of former days, and perceive, while reviewing the long line of causes, how the most important events of our lives originated in the most trifling circumstances; how the beginning of our greatest happiness or greatest misery is to be attributed to a delay, to an accident, to a mistake; we learn a lesson of profound humility.

Some persons, instead of making a religion for their God, are content to make a god of their religion.

There is hardly a more common error than that of taking the man who has one talent, for a genius.