A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or as the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

Character is the basis of happiness and happiness the sanction of character.

The family is an early expedient and in many ways irrational. If the race had developed a special sexless class to be nurses, pedagogues, and slaves, like the workers among ants and bees, then the family would have been unnecessary. Such a division of labor would doubtless have involved evils of its own, but it would have obviated some drags and vexations proper to the family.

With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.

It is the acme of life to understand life.

The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.