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.

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

Many a man has a kind of a kaleidoscope, where the bits of broken glass are his own merits and fortunes; and they fall into harmonious arrangements, and delight him, often most mischievously and to his ultimate detriment; but they are a present pleasure.

We are pleased with one who instantly assents to our opinions, but we love a proselyte.

Tolerance is the only real test of civilization.

Those who never philosophized until they met with disappointments, have mostly become disappointed philosophers

The sense of danger is never, perhaps, so fully apprehended as when the danger has been overcome.