If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

Education, and the life of the mind generally, is a matter in which individual initiative is the chief thing needed; the function of the state should begin and end with insistence on some kind of education, and, if possible, a kind which promotes mental individualism, not a kind which happens to conform to the prejudices of government officials.

Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself.

To like many people spontaneously and without effort is perhaps the greatest of all sources of personal happiness.

There are infinite possibilities of error, and more cranks take up fashionable untruths than unfashionable truths.

It is essential to happiness that our way of living should spring from our own deep impulses and not from the accidental tastes and desires of those who happen to be our neighbors, or even our relations.

Envy ... is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations.