“In order to thoroughly enjoy anything, one must feel the absence of it at times.”

A good laugh overcomes more difficulties and dissipates more dark clouds than any other one thing.

The sweetness of life lies in usefulness, like honey deep in the heart of a clover bloom.

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.

It is the simple things of life that make living worthwhile, the sweet fundamental things such as love and duty, work and rest, and living close to nature.

Home is the nicest word there is.

I believe we would be happier to have a personal revolution in our individual lives and go back to simpler living and more direct thinking.

There’s no great loss without some small gain.

There is a spirit in every home, a sort of composite spirit composed of the thoughts and feelings of the members of the family as a composite photograph is formed of the features of different individuals.

People used to have time to live and enjoy themselves, but there is no time anymore for anything but work, work, work.

It is not the things you have that make you happy. It is love and kindness and helping each other and just plain being good.

The object of all education is to make folks fit to live.

Tact does for life just what lubricating oil does for machinery.

Money hasn’t any value of its own; it represents the stored up energy of men and women and is really just someone’s promise to pay a certain amount of that energy.

Our hearts grow tender with childhood memories and love of kindred, and we are better throughout the year for having, in spirit, become a child again at Christmas-time.

Why should we need extra time in which to enjoy ourselves? If we expect to enjoy our life, we will have to learn to be joyful in all of it, not just at stated intervals when we can get time or when we have nothing else to do.

The days have never been long enough to do the things I would like to do. Every year has held more of interest than the year before.

Darkness is merely the absence of light, and fear is merely the absence of love. If we want to be rid of fear, we cannot fight it but must replace it with love.

The purity of man is the absence of something, the purity of Jesus is the presence of something.

Patience is power. Patience is not an absence of action; rather it is “timing” it waits on the right time to act, for the right principles and in the right way.

What we call evil is the absence of Light, of love, in all cases.

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

Total absence of humor makes life a total drudgery.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space.

Happiness is not the absence of problems; it’s the ability to deal with them.