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

How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.

I have never seen fundamental improvements imposed from the top by ordinances and laws.

Canonise ‘business success,’ and men who made a success like that of the Standard Oil Trust become national heroes!

[John D. Rockefeller] didn’t care about anyone he did anything just to be rich and be the only company standing without any competition. He destroyed anyone else.

My final comment is that I still believe this man [John D. Rockefeller] is corrupt and he used unfair ways to become wealthy, all he cared about was his money and wasn’t considered.

We are a commercial people. We cannot boast of our arts, our crafts, our cultivation; our boast is in the wealth we produce.

My whole theory for the improvement of society is based on a belief in the discipline and the education of the individual to self-control and right doing, for the sake of right doing.

In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make.

No value is destroyed for you – only for the original owner.

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

One of our gravest mistakes is persuading ourselves that nobody has passed this way before.

Perhaps our national ambition to standardize ourselves has behind it the notion that democracy means standardization. But standardization is the surest way to destroy the initiative.

A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who start it.

A mind which really lays hold of a subject is not easily detached from it.

There is no more effective medicine to apply to feverish public sentiments than figures.

A mind truly cultivated never feels that the intellectual process is complete until it can reproduce in some media the thing which it has absorbed.

I can’t be happy every day but I can be cheerful.

The people are immensely likable- cheerful, extrovert, quick-witted, and unfailingly obliging. Their cities are safe and clean and nearly always built on water. They have a society that is prosperous, well ordered, and instinctively egalitarian.

I’ve always tried to be cheerful, because I think people who whine are boring, and I never could tolerate bores.

Buy straw hats in the wintertime. Summer will surely come.

It is difficult to speak adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent.

The cozy fire is bright and gay, The merry kettle boils away and hums a cheerful song. I sing the saucer and the cup; Pray, Mary, fill the teapot up, And do not make it strong

If your best friend’s feeling tearful, Try not to be too cheerful. Just let her fill your ear full Of sad tales by the score. And when she is through, She’ll feel as good as.

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.