Solitude is fine when you are at peace with yourself and have something definite to do.

Plunge boldly into the thick of life, and seize it where you will, it is always interesting.

Everything is both simpler than we can imagine and more entangled than we can conceive.

I know nothing more mocking than a devil that despairs.

When we treat man as he is, we make him worse than he is; when we treat him as if he already were what he potentially could be, we make him what he should be.

America, you have it better than our continent, the old one.

So then the year is repeating its old story again. We are come once more, thank God! to its most charming chapter. The violets and the Mayflowers are as its inscriptions or vignettes. It always makes a pleasant impression on us, when we open again at these pages of the book of life.