“Few minds wear out; more rust out.”

Troubles forereckoned are doubly suffered.

The knowledge beyond all other knowledge is the knowledge how to excuse.

It is some compensation for great evils, that they enforce great lessons.

Wit, like poetry, is insusceptible of being constructed upon rules founded merely in reason. Like faith, it exists independent of reason, and sometimes in hostility to it.

It is with charity as with money–the more we stand in need of it, the less we have to give away.

Contentment is not happiness. An oyster may be contented. Happiness is compounded of richer elements.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough.

No man is happy without a delusion of some kind. Delusions are as necessary to our happiness as realities.

Cheerfulness is an offshoot of goodness and of wisdom.

The great obstacle to progress is prejudice.

The lively and mercurial are as open books, with the leaves turned down at the notable passages. Their souls sit at the windows of their eyes, seeing and to be seen.

Words, like cannon balls, should go direct to their mark.

Tearless grief bleeds inwardly.

A sound discretion is not so much indicated by never making a mistake as by never repeating it.

The method of the enterprising is to plan with audacity and execute with vigor.

How like a railway tunnel is the poor man’s life, with the light of childhood at one end, the intermediate gloom, and only the glimmer of a future life at the other extremity!

A quiet mind does not mean that there will be no thoughts or mental movements at all, but that these will be on the surface, and you will feel your true being within, separate from them, observing but not carried away.

My mind is not my own. I don’t recognize her when I am alone.

Sit in meditation ! But do not think ! Look only at your mind ! You will see thoughts coming into it ! Before they can enter, throw these away from your mind till your mind is capable of entire silence.

When we turn the mind inwards, God manifests as the inner consciousness.

Great men stamp their mind upon their age and nation.

This perception of division between the seer and the object that is seen, is situated in the mind. For those remaining in the heart, the seer becomes one with the sight.

You could say that tidying orders the mind while cleaning purifies it.

While doing work if the mind continues to be active let it be so, but there must be at the same time a capacity for silence.