A friend is a gift you give yourself.

Shared joys make a friend, not shared sufferings.

A friend is as it were a second self.

Friends accept you the way you are.

We are all full of weakness and errors; let us mutually pardon each other our follies—it is the first law of nature.

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.

The world would be happier if men had the same capacity to be silent that they have to speak.

But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?

Rest, nature, books, music, such is my idea of happiness.

Gratitude is the way to happiness.

You don’t develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

Actions are right in proportion as they promote happiness, wrong as the produce the reverse.

Conquer yourself rather than the world.

If someone succeeds in provoking you, realize that your mind is complicit in the provocation.

And God said love your enemy and I obeyed him and loved myself.

When we seek to discover the best in others, we somehow bring out the best in ourselves.

You don't need another person, place or thing to make you whole. God already did that. Your job is to know it.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

My wish for you is that you continue. Continue to be who you are, to astonish a mean world with your acts of kindness.

I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

Unless above himself he can erect himself, how poor a thing is man!

The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.

It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than others their opinions more than other people, but care more about their opinion than our own.

If you compromise your own conscience, you will weaken your conscience. Soon your conscience will fail to guide you and you never will have real wealth based on peace of mind.

It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

The knowledge and skills you have achieved are meant to be forgotten so you can float comfortably in emptiness, without obstruction.

In wilderness is the preservation of the world.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.

I hate who steals my solitude without, in exchange, offering me true company.