“What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?”

Genius … is necessarily intolerant of fetters.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

Appearances have very little to do with happiness.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

“Abroad,” that large home of ruined reputations.

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty – it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

And this is difficult if you have not entirely persuaded yourself. It is especially tricky to do this if you are also naked, and making two cups of coffee.

Honestly, I’ve always had difficulty relaxing, unwinding and going to bed – that kind of stuff.

We have inherited new difficulties because we have inherited more privileges.

The world is impermanent. [All things change. Knowing this helps you see the end of any difficulty and thereby have hope.]

Difficulties give us the opportunity to prove our greatness by overcoming them.

The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.

Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.

May justice and righteousness be the stability of our times, and order arise out of confusion. Great difficulties may be surmounted by patience and perseverance.