“Life is a mirror: if you frown at it, it frowns back; if you smile, it returns the greeting.”

No particular motive for living, except the custom and habit of it.

Follow your honest convictions and be strong.

Pray God, keep us simple.

A lady who sets her heart upon a lad in uniform must prepare to change lovers pretty quickly, or her life will be but a sad one.

If there is no love more in yonder heart, it is but a corpse unburied.

Love makes fools of us all, big and little.

Learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what the great men admired; they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely, and worship meanly.

Vanity Fair is a very vain, wicked, foolish place, full of all sorts of humbugs and falsenesses and pretensions.

To be thought rich is as good as to be rich.

One of the greatest of a great man’s qualities is success; ‘t is the result of all the others; ‘t is a latent power in him which compels the favor of the gods, and subjugates fortune.

It is an awful thing to get a glimpse, as one sometimes does, when the time is past, of some little, little wheel which works the whole mighty machinery of fate, and see how our destinies turn on a minute’s delay or advance.

I set it down as a maxim, that it is good for a man to live where he can meet his betters, intellectual and social.

To be beautiful is enough! if a woman can do that well who should demand more from her? You don’t want a rose to sing.

Women are jealous of cigars, they regard them as a strong rival.

Then sing as Martin Luther sang, As Doctor Martin Luther sang, “Who loves not wine, woman and song, He is a fool his whole life long.”

Never marry with the expectation of changing a person.

Give to those who have nothing to give to you.

Is this what I want to be? This? Is this all I’ve got—is this everything I can give? Is this going to be my life? Do I accept that?

The movement of the heart as we practice generosity in the outer world mirrors the movement of the heart when we let go of conditioned views about ourselves on our inner journey. Letting go creates a joyful sense of space in our minds

Success always calls for greater generosity—though most people, lost in the darkness of their own egos, treat it as an occasion for greater greed.

Try to do unto others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better that they should fail than you should.

That’s what I consider true generosity: You give your all, and yet you always feel as if it costs you nothing.

I’m a doer, and whether it was the tsunami in Sri Lanka or the earthquake in Indonesia, I was always saying, I should be there; I should be helping out.

Some of us have so much to give. We can give it all away and still know how to live.