“Let’s be cheerful! We have no more right to steal the brightness out of the day for our own family than we have to steal the purse of a stranger.”

The only stupid thing about words is the spelling of them.

In these days when we feed those who are not hungry, we are stealing from those who are starving, even though the food is our own.

These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves — they’re good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on ’em.

Vices are simply overworked virtues.

Remember well, and bear in mind, a constant friend is hard to find.

Remember me with smiles and laughter, for that is how I’ll remember you all. If you can only remember me with tears, then don’t remember me at all.

If the members of a home are ill-temperered and quarrelsome, how quickly you feel it when you enter the house. You may not know just what is wrong, but you wish to make your visit short.

We heap up around us things that we do not need as the crow makes piles of glittering pebbles.

Far worst of all, the fever had settled in Mary’s eyes, and Mary was blind.

This earthly life is a battle,’ said Ma. ‘If it isn’t one thing to contend with, it’s another. It always has been so, and it always will be. The sooner you make up your mind to that, the better off you are, and more thankful for your pleasures.

When Pa was at home the gun always lay across those two wooden hooks above the door. … The gun was always loaded, and always above the door so that Pa could get it quickly and easily, any time he needed a gun.

These happy golden years are passing by, these happy golden years.

Every job is good if you do your best and work hard. A man who works hard stinks only to the ones that have nothing to do but smell.

Her blue eyes were still beautiful, but they did not know what was before them, and Mary herself could never look through them again to tell Laura what she was thinking without saying a word.

Many a good beginning makes a bad ending.

The wilderness needs your whole attention.

If the Lord loveth a cheerful giver, as St. Paul says, we may depend upon it that He loveth a cheerful worker; and where we can cleave the way to His love there we find His endless generosity.

Though my friends envied me because I always seemed so cheerful and confident, I was secretly terrified of practically everything.

Ripe old age, cheerful, useful, and understanding, is one of the finest influences in the world.

Cheerful endurance of hardships and contempt of surroundings become a virtue in a pioneer. Comfort is a comparatively new thing in the United States.

To our generation Einstein has been made to become a double symbol – a symbol of the mind travelling in the cold regions of space, and a symbol of the brave and generous outcast, pure in heart and cheerful of spirit.

The human body is a steed that goes freest and longest under a light rider, and the lightest of all riders is a cheerful heart.

Every heart that has beat strongly and cheerfully has left a hopeful impulse behind it in the world, and bettered the tradition of mankind.

If a man must make himself appear cheerful; he must know why he is miserable.