“I never knew an early-rising, hard-working, prudent man, careful of his earnings, and strictly honest who complained of bad luck.”

Involved sentences, crooked, circuitous, and parenthetical, no matter how musically they may be balanced, are prejudicial to a facile understanding of the truth.

To know that one has a secret is to know half the secret itself.

Well married a person has wings, poorly married shackles.

To become an able and successful man in any profession, three things are necessary, nature, study and practice.

To do good work a man should no doubt be industrious. To do great work he must certainly be idle a well.

All men are tempted. There is no man that lives that can’t be broken down, provided it is the right temptation, put in the right spot.

That is true culture which helps us to work for the social betterment of all.

If a man harbors any sort of fear, it percolates through all his thinking, damages his personality, makes him landlord to a ghost.

The first hour of the morning is the rudder of the day.

Beauty may be said to be God’s trademark in creation.

To the great tree-loving fraternity we belong. We love trees with universal and unfeigned love, and all things that do grow under them or around them – the whole leaf and root tribe.

God sends experience to paint men’s portraits.

There are more quarrels smothered by just shutting your mouth, and holding it shut, than by all the wisdom in the world.

Don’t look where you fall, but where you slipped.

I beseech you to correct one fault – severe speech of others; never speak evil of any man, no matter what the facts may be.

A conservative young man has wound up his life before it was unreeled. We expect old men to be conservative but when a nation’s young men are so, its funeral bell is already rung.

I never said I was a ‘good girl.’ I’m not a bad girl. I’m just normal, and that’s what I’m going to be. There’s no bad girl with whips and chains that’s going to come out. I think people like me because I was myself.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much Champagne is just right.

Nothing is so great an example of bad manners as flattery. If you flatter all the company, you please none; If you flatter only one or two, you offend the rest.

Things are sweeter when they’re lost. I know–because once I wanted something and got it. It was the only thing I ever wanted badly, Dot, and when I got it it turned to dust in my hand.

First, say to yourself, ‘I’m totally independent of the good or bad opinions of others.’ Second: ‘I’m beneath no one.’ Third: ‘I’m fearless in the face of any and all challenges.’

A bad song, the three best singers in the world cannot save it, and that’s the bottom line.

Radical transparency fosters goodness in so many ways for the same reasons that bad things are more likely to take place behind closed doors.

Take responsibility for your last bad decision, and then let it go. Don’t blame others or make excuses for yourself.