Pessimism is a product of our civilization. It is not natural to the savage; he feels pain, or discomfort, and suffers from these palpable conditions, but when he recovers from wounds he forgets the torments, and when he is well fed he is joyous in the light of day.

True love survives all shocks: an affection originally produced by admiration for unusual beauty may not only survive the loss of that beauty, but may become more intense if the beauty has changed into ugliness through causes that bind the lovers together in tender associations.

Optimism will grow like a flower if the soil be properly prepared.

We must rejoice when love is great, and pardon its excess, for love is the staff of life, and life without love is life in vain.

Some people would be discontented in Paradise, others ... are cheerful in a graveyard.

Vanity is easily forgiven, for we are all vain, and even as we laugh at the weakness of others we feel that their vanity has touched the responding chord of our own.

Children should not be coddled in their intellectual training any more than in their physical; and though the studies should be made interesting the interest should arise out of the studies themselves. We have bred a generation that cannot digest anything intellectual but tablets of peptonized food. One sees that in the popular papers with their brevity, still increasing in brevity as far as brevity can increase, and in the capacity for thought of our rulers.