“I regard you with an indifference closely bordering on aversion.”

I’ve a grand memory for forgetting.

By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.

Sooner or later everyone sits down to a banquet of consequences.

There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.

Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is there that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life.

It’s a pleasant thing to be young, and have ten toes.

You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving.

Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.

It is not likely that posterity will fall in love with us, but not impossible that it may respect or sympathize; so a man would rather leave behind him the portrait of his spirit than a portrait of his face.

If a man loves the labour of his trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the gods have called him.

It is the mark of a good action that it appears inevitable in retrospect.

A friend is a gift you give yourself.

To be idle requires a strong sense of personal identity.

Everyone lives by selling something.

The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.

I shall be glad to lie down with my fathers in honor. It is human at least, if not divine.

Pleasure and distress, fear and courage, desire and aversion, where have these affections and experiences their seat?

If we can embrace the adventure and risk and equip our churches to lay down their lives and abandon their inherent loss-aversion.

If we could be freed from our aversion to loss, our whole outlook on risk would change.

When we accept life as it is, we can respond appropriately to the way we’re experiencing it, rather than just reacting out of fear and aversion.

The problem is grasping the clock. So what do I do? Let it go, lay it aside – put it down gently without any kind of aversion. Then I can pick it up again, see what time it is and lay it aside when necessary.

This movement of grasping and aversion gives rise to a sense of a separate ‘me,’ and in turn the sense of ‘me’ strengthens itself this way.