“An eager pursuit of fortune is inconsistent with a severe devotion to truth. The heart must grow tranquil before the thought can become searching.”

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!

Pleasure and pain spring not so much from the nature of things, as from our manner of considering them. Pleasure, especially, is never an invariable effect of particular circumstances.

It is our relation to circumstances that determine their influence over us. The same wind that blows one ship into port may blow another off shore.

All growth starts at the end of your comfort zone.

All of my life I’ve been growing into who I am in my life today and I am still growing, but I believe in love and nothing can deter me in that.

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

There are no such things as limits to growth, because there are no limits to the human capacity for intelligence, imagination, and wonder.

Truth, like gold, is to be obtained not by its growth, but by washing away from it all that is not gold.

Loving relationships, though necessary for life, health, and growth, are among the most complicated skills.

Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth.

Imperceptibly the love of these discords grew upon me as my love of music grew stronger.