I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!

... the majority of us scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the faultiness of our own arguments, orthe dulness [sic] of our own jokes.

What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.

Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.