A mixture of admiration and pity is one of the surest recipes for affection.

The worst use that can be made of success is to boast of it.

Few have wished for memory so much as they have longed for forgetfulness.

Selfishness, when it is punished by the world, is mostly punished because it is connected with egotism.

Remember that in giving any reason at all for refusing, you lay some foundation for a future request.

Be cheerful [and grateful for the good that you have]: do not brood over fond hopes unrealized until a chain is fastened on each thought and wound around the heart. Nature intended you to be the fountain-spring of cheerfulness and social life, and not the mountain of despair and melancholy.

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.