Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow, but tend and cherish it till it comes to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh.

Not by constraint or severity shall you have access to true wisdom, but by abandonment, and childlike mirth-fulness. If you would know aught, be gay before it.

I am grateful for what I have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.

This life is not for complaint, but for satisfaction.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bone.

Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

Men go back to the mountains, as they go back to sailing ships at sea, because in the mountains and on the sea they must face up.