One well-cultivated talent, deepened and enlarged, is worth one hundred shallow faculties.

As frost, raised to its utmost intensity, produces the sensation of fire, so any good quality, overwrought and pushed to excess, turns into its own contrary.

The same disappointments in life will chasten and refine one man's spirit, embitter another's.

A great deal of the joy of life consists in doing perfectly, or at least to the best of one's ability, everything which one attempts to do. There is a sense of satisfaction, a pride in surveying such a work, a work which is rounded, full, exact, complete in all its parts-which the superficial man, who leaves his work in a slovenly, slipshod, half-finished condition can never know. It is this conscientious completeness which turns work into art. The smallest thing, well done, becomes artistic.

We all have two childhoods, the unhappy one and the happy one.

Solitary reading will enable a man to stuff himself with information, but without conversation his mind will become like a pond without an outlet-a mass of unhealthy stag-nature. It is not enough to harvest knowledge by study; the wind of talk must winnow it and blow away the chaff. Then will the clear, bright grains of wisdom be garnered, for our own use or that of others.

The difficulties, hardships and trials of life, the obstacles... are positive blessings. They knit the muscles more firmly, and teach self-reliance.