In the Imaginary Conversations, Aspasia asks Pericles: "Is there any station so happy as an uncontested place in a small community, where manners are simple, where wants are few, where respect is the tribute of probity, and love is the guerdon of beneficence?"
"From my tutor," said the good emperor Marcus Aurelius, "I learnt endurance of labor, and to want little, and to work with my own hands, and not to meddle with other people's affairs, and not to be ready to listen to slander."
"Ah!" exclaimed the Attic Philosopher, "if men but knew in what a small dwelling joy can live, and how little it costs to furnish it!... Does a man drink more when he drinks from a large glass? From whence comes that universal dread of mediocrity, the fruitful mother of peace and liberty? Ah! there is the evil which, above every other, it should be the aim of both public and private education to anticipate! If that were got rid of, what treasons would be spared, what baseness avoided, what a chain of excess and crime would be forever broken! We award the palm to charity, and to self-sacrifice: but, above all, let us award it to moderation, for it is the great social virtue. Even when it does not create the others, it stands instead of them." Socrates used to say that the man who ate with the greatest appetite had the least need of delicacies; and that he who drank with the greatest appetite was the least inclined to look for a draught which is not at hand; and that those who want fewest things are nearest to the gods. Milton says that the lyric poet may drink wine and live generously, but the epic poet, he who shall sing of the gods, and their descent unto men, must drink water out of a golden bowl. "Have you never noticed," said Hiero, "all the multitudinous contrivances which are set before tyrants, acid, and harsh, and sour; and whatsoever else there can be of the same kind?" "To be sure I have," said Simonides; "and all these things appeared to me to be very contrary to the natural taste of any man." "And do you think," said Hiero, "that these dishes are anything else but the fancies of a diseased and vitiated taste; since those who eat with appetite, you well know, have no need of these contrivances and provocatives?" Michel Angelo seldom partook of the enjoyments of the table, and used to say, "However rich I may have been, I have always lived as a poor man." Said Seneca, "He that lives according to nature cannot be poor, and he that exceeds can never have enough." Epicurus said, "I feed sweetly upon bread and water, those sweet and easy provisions of the body, and I defy the pleasures of costly provisions." Cardinal Mancini staying once on a visit to Poussin till it was dark, the artist took the candle in his hand, lighted him down-stairs, and waited upon him to his coach. The prelate was sorry to see him do it himself, and could not help saying, "I very much pity you, Poussin, that you have not one servant." "And I pity you more, my lord," replied Poussin, "that you have so many." "No man needs to flatter," said Jeremy Taylor, "if he can live as nature did intend. He need not swell his accounts, and intricate his spirit with arts of subtlety and contrivance; he can be free from fears, and the chances of the world cannot concern him. All our trouble is from within us; and if a dish of lettuce and a clear fountain can cool all my heats, so that I shall have neither thirst nor pride, lust nor revenge, envy nor ambition, I am lodged in the bosom of felicity."
"Prosperity," says Froude, in one of his essays, "is consistent with intense worldliness, intense selfishness, intense hardness of heart; while the grander features of human character,—self-sacrifice, disregard of pleasure, patriotism, love of knowledge, devotion to any great and good cause,—these have no tendency to bring men what is called fortune. They do not even necessarily promote their happiness; for do what they will in this way, the horizon of what they desire to do perpetually flies before them. High hopes and enthusiasms are generally disappointed in results; and the wrongs, the cruelties, the wretchedness of all kinds which forever prevail among mankind,—the short-comings in himself of which he becomes more conscious as he becomes really better,—these things, you may be sure, will prevent a noble-minded man from ever being particularly happy." "I should rather say," he says in another essay, "that the Scots had been an unusually happy people. Intelligent industry, the honest doing of daily work, with a sense that it must be done well, under penalties; the necessaries of life moderately provided for; and a sensible content with the situation of life in which men are born—this through the week, and at the end of it the Cotter's Saturday Night—the homely family, gathered reverently and peacefully together, and irradiated with a sacred presence. Happiness! such happiness as we human creatures are likely to know upon this world will be found there, if anywhere."
"On the Simplon," says a German traveler, "amid the desert of snow and mist, in the vicinity of a refuge, a boy and his little sister were journeying up the mountain by the side of our carriage. Both had on their backs little baskets filled with wood, which they had gathered in the lower mountains, where there is still some vegetation. The boy gave us some specimens of rock crystal and other stone, for which we gave him some small coins. The delight with which he cast stolen glances at his money, as he passed by our carriage, made upon me an indelible impression. Never before had I seen such a heavenly expression of felicity. I could not but reflect that God had placed all sources and capabilities for happiness in the human heart; and that, with respect to happiness, it is perfectly indifferent how and where one dwells."
"A man," says Cumberland, "who is gifted with worldly qualities and accommodations is armed with hands, as a ship with grappling-irons, ready to catch hold of, and make himself fast to everything he comes in contact with, and such a man, with all these properties of adhesion, has also the property, like the polypus, of a most miraculous and convenient indivisibility; cut off his hold—nay, cut him how you will, he is still a polypus, whole and entire. Men of this sort still work their way out of their obscurity like cockroaches out of the hold of a ship, and crawl into notice, nay, even into kings' palaces, as the frogs did into Pharaoh's; the happy faculty of noting times and seasons, and a lucky promptitude to avail themselves of moments with address and boldness, are alone such all-sufficient requisites, such marketable stores of worldly knowledge, that, although the minds of those who own them shall be, as to all the liberal sciences, a rasa tabula, yet knowing these things needful to be known, let their difficulties and distresses be what they may, though the storm of adversity threatens to overwhelm them, they are in a life-boat, buoyed up by corks, and cannot sink. These are the stray children turned loose upon the world, whom Fortune, in her charity, takes charge of, and for whose guidance in the by-ways and cross-roads of their pilgrimage she sets up fairy finger-posts, discoverable by those whose eyes are near the ground, but unperceived by such whose looks are raised above it."
"Genial manners are good," says Emerson, "and power of accommodation to any circumstance; but the high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness,—whether it be to make baskets, or broad-swords, or canals, or statues, or songs."
Wordsworth's man-servant, James, was brought up in a work-house, and at nine years of age was turned out of the house with two shillings in his pocket. When without a six-pence, he was picked up by a farmer, who took him into his service on condition that all his clothes should be burnt (they were so filthy); and he was to pay for his new clothes out of his wages of two pounds ten shillings per annum. Here he stayed as long as he was wanted. "I have been so lucky," said James, "that I was never out of a place a day in my life, for I was always taken into service immediately. I never got into a scrape, or was drunk in my life, for I never taste any liquor. So that I have often said, I consider myself as a favorite of fortune!" This is like Goldsmith's cripple in the park, who, remarking upon his appealing wretchedness, said, "'Tis not every man that can be born with a golden spoon in his mouth."