And then they say one is misanthropical. Hang it! who can help being misanthropical when he finds everybody getting on in life except himself?

We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.

Don't cling to anything and don't reject anything.

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

If you're unhappy with what you've had over the last 50 years, you have an unfortunate misappraisal of life. It's as good as it gets, and it's very likely to get worse.

Chicago sounds rough to the maker of verse. One comfort we have - Cincinnati sounds worse.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.

Do the best you can . . . enjoy the present . . . rest satisfied with what you have.

It is not greedy to enjoy a good dinner, any more than it is to enjoy a good concert. But I do think there is something greedy about trying to enjoy the dinner and the concert at the same time.

She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age.

Love of our brothers? That's when we learned to hate our brothers for the first time in our lives. We began to hate them for every meal they swallowed, for every small pleasure they enjoyed, for one man's new shirt, for another's wife's hat, for an outing with their family for a paint job on their house--it was taken from us, it was paid for by our privations, our denials, our hunger.

I'd never once heard her dwell on the disappointments. Instead she seemed to find small pleasures everywhere.