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

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

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.

Reading is sometimes an ingenious device for avoiding thought.

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.

The most common-place people become highly imaginative when they are in a passion. Whole dramas of insult, injury, and wrong pass before their minds,--efforts of creative genius, for there is sometimes not a fact to go upon.