Many with trust, with doubt few, are undone.

Good-humor is allied to generosity, ill-humor to meanness.

Good-humor will sometimes conquer ill-humor, but ill-humor will conquer it oftener; and for this plain reason, good-humor must operate on generosity, ill-humor on meanness.

Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body.

Discernment is a power of the understanding in which few excel. Is not that owing to its connection with impartiality and truth? for are not prejudice and partiality blind?

To divest one's self of some prejudices would be like taking off the skin to feel the better.

Avarice starves its possessor to fatten those who come after, and who are eagerly awaiting the demise of the accumulator.

Envy is but the smoke of low estate, Ascending still against the fortunate.

Our companions please us less from the charms we find in their conversation than from those they find in ours.

What an argument in favor of social connections is the observation that by communicating our grief we have less, and by communicating our pleasure we have more.

A lively and agreeable man has not only the merit of liveliness and agreeableness himself, but that also of awakening them in others.

Life is partly what we make it, and partly what it is made by the friends we choose.

Heartache wasn't my intention... love was.

Love enters us like a vague ailment. Your head spins. Your underarms tingle. Love hurts and love has consequences: marriage, babies, separation, longing, human complications.

I don't think everybody in Vermont loves me.

The sublimated idealism of the Enlightenment, the spirit of the League of Nations and of the United Nations Charter have not proved strong enough to control the aggressive dynamism of nationalism.

I have been nominated three times. I have the little pieces of paper to prove it.

I have not come to praise Caesar, but to bury him.

I'm not the type to sit on the porch and watch life go by.

Perfect life is a contradiction in terms. Therefore we must always expect to find things not up to our highest ideal. Knowing this, we are bound to make the best of everything.

Unless the man is master of his soul all other kinds of mastery amount to little.