It is dangerous to abandon one's self to the luxury of grief; it deprives one of courage, and even of the wish for recovery.

Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations --all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down.

One may guess the why and wherefore of a tear and yet find it too subtle to give any account of. A tear may be the poetical resume of so many simultaneous impressions, the quintessence of so many opposing thoughts! It is like a drop of one of those precious elixirs of the East which contain the life of twenty plants fused into a single aroma.

To understand is to possess the thing understood, first by sympathy and then by intelligence.

Learn to... be what you are, and learn to resign with a good grace all that you are not.

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

Order is man's greatest need, and his true well-being.