Do not laugh much or often or unrestrainedly.

When you actively engage in gradually refining yourself, you retreat from your lazy ways of covering yourself or making excuses. Instead of feeling a persistent current of low-level shame, you move forward by using the creative possibilities of this moment, your current situation.

It is the act of an ill-instructed man to blame others for his own bad condition; it is the act of one who has begun to be instructed, to lay the blame on himself; and of one whose instruction is completed, neither to blame another, nor himself.

Don't be concerned who is watching you. The triumphs and merits of others belong to them - as do yours to you. Make the most of what you've got.

Contentment, as it is a short road and pleasant, has great delight and little trouble.

It is our attitude toward events, not events themselves, which we can control. Nothing is by its own nature calamitous -- even death is terrible only if we fear it.

Don't seek to have events happen as you wish, but wish them to happen as they do happen, and all will be well with you.