“The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.”

Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

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.

I think we all carry within us different versions of ourselves. Our true, greatest, most honest versions of ourselves can either be developed and nourished, or it can remain dead from neglect.

It matters not whether its proponents have a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ after their name. It is a tax increase in either case.

When you think for-profit and non-profit, you most often think of entities with either zero social return or zero return on capital and zero social return.

Anyone who says that money cannot buy happiness has had very little success with either one.

We’re always mourning things that have died. It’s a bit much sometimes. These studios have no fresh air, and there’s this unwritten rule that they don’t have windows, either.

You either get life or you don’t, and if you don’t – life gets you.

Thoughts are chemical. They can either kill us or cure us.

Many facets on the stone. Nooks and crannies in abundance. Things are usually not either black or white, but multicolored.