happiness makes us older, less romantic, less in need of dreams. Discontent, not happiness, is the food of youth and poetry.

the urgent crowds out the essential.

If you would be happy all your life, plant a garden.

The hardest of all is learning to be a well of affection, and not a fountain, to show them that we love them, not when we feel like it, but when they do.

The sorrows of children are profound and unsuspected.

There is a stage with people we love when we are no longer separate from them, but so close in sympathy that we live through them as directly as through ourselves. ... we push back our hair because theirs is in their eyes.

Perhaps the way with any obsession is to ignore it simply. Not to fight it, since it draws strength from any contact with us, whether hostile or friendly.