Science has always promised two things not necessarily related; an increase first in our powers, second in our happiness or wisdom, and we have come to realize that it is the first and less important of the two promises which it has kept most abundantly.

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.

It is disastrous to own more of anything than you can possess, and it is one of the most fundamental laws of human nature that our power actually to possess is limited.

If we are deprived of hope as well as fear, we are compensated by being given an almost endless patience for enduring or simply for waiting.

When, in the present world, men behave well, that is no doubt sometimes because they are creatures of habit as well as, sometimes, because they are reasonable.

Happiness is a kind of gratitude and vice versa.

Nature takes no account of even the most reasonable of human excuses.