Happiness consists not in having much, but in wanting no more than you have.

Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel's face. Every man deems that he has precisely the trials and temptations which are the hardest of all others for him to bear; but they are so, simply because they are the very ones he most needs.

Even if nothing worse than wasted mental effort could be laid to the charge of theology, that alone ought to be sufficient to banish it from the earth, as one of the worst enemies of mankind.

I will work in my own way, according to the light that is in me.

The old men gazed on them in their loveliness, and turned away with that deep and painful sigh, which the gladness of childhood, and thetransient beauty of youth, are so apt to awaken in the bosom of the aged.

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.

There have always been a large class of thinkers who deny that the world makes any progress. They say we move in a circle; that evils are never conquered, but only change their forms.