“The improvement of understanding is for two ends: first, our own increase of knowledge; secondly, to enable us to deliver that knowledge to others
“Whenever you're in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude.
“The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community.
“I'm treating you as a friend asking you to share my present minuses in the hope that I can ask you to share my future pluses
“The greatest comfort of my old age, and that which gives me the highest satisfaction, is the pleasing remembrance of the many benefits and friendly offices I have done to others.
“I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects. A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.
“A man over ninety is a great comfort to all his elderly neighbors: he is a picket-guard at the extreme outpost; and the young folks of sixty and seventy feel that the enemy must get by him before he can come near their camp
“If men would consider not so much where they differ, as wherein they agree, there would be far less of uncharitableness and angry feeling in the world
“He who would pass his declining years with honor and comfort, should, when young, consider that he may one day become old, and remember when he is old, that he has once been young
“To a man of pleasure every moment appears to be lost, which partakes not of the vivacity of amusement
“If you wish to succeed in life, make perseverance your bosom friend, experience your wise counselor, caution your elder brother, and hope your guardian genius
“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration
“Grief that is dazed and speechless is out of fashion: the modern woman mourns her husband loudly and tells you the whole story of his death, which distresses her so much that she forgets not the slightest detail about it
“We seldom repent of speaking little, very often of speaking too much: a vulgar and trite maxim, which all the world knows and, but which all the world does not practice
“If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin
“What occasions the greater part of the world's quarrels? Simply this: Two minds meet and do not understand each other in time enough to prevent any shock of surprise at the conduct of either party
“What difference does it make to you what someone else becomes, or says, or does? You do not need to answer for others, only for yourself.
“The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow, and the men who lend
“Boys are capital fellows in their own way, among their mates; but they are unwholesome companions for grown people