You cannot make yourself feel something you do not feel, but you can make yourself do right in spite of your feelings.

Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked.

Anger can give energy to the mind but only if it is harnessed and held in control.

Order is the shape upon which beauty depends.

You are free when you gain back yourself,” Madame Wu said. “You can be as free within these walls as you could be in the whole world. And how could you be free if, however far you wander, you still carry inside yourself the constant thought of him? See where you belong in the stream of life. Let it flow through you, cool and strong. Do not dam it with your two hands, lest he break the dam and so escape you. Let him go free, and you will be free.

Love cannot be forced, love cannot be coaxed and teased. It comes out of heaven, unasked and unsought.

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. It is awful to see the lean hands of dotage making a coffer of the grave.