Smiles come back to greet us;
If we’re frowning all the while,
Frowns forever meet us.
It is a maxim with me not to ask what, under similar circumstances, I would not grant.—Washington.
Next to virtues, the fun in this world is what we can least spare.—Strickland.
“As you cannot have a sweet and wholesome abode unless you admit the air and sunshine freely into your rooms,” says James Allen, “so a strong body and a bright, happy, or serene countenance can result only from the free admittance into the mind of thoughts of joy and good will and serenity. There is no physician like cheerful thought for dissipating the ills of the body; there is no comforter to compare with good will for dispersing the shadows of grief and sorrow. To live continually in thoughts of ill will, cynicism, suspicion and envy, is to be confined in a self-made prison-hole. But to think well of all, to be cheerful with all, to patiently learn to find the good in all—such unselfish thoughts are the very portals of heaven; and to dwell day by day in thoughts of peace toward every creature will bring abounding peace to the possessor of such thoughts.”
I resolved that, like the sun, so long as my day lasted, I would look on the bright side of everything.—Thomas Hood.
Says Robert Louis Stevenson: “A happy man or woman is a better thing to find than a five-pound note. He or she is radiating a focus of good will; and his or her entrance into a room is as though another candle had been lighted.”
Ideas go booming through the world louder than cannon. Thoughts are mightier than armies. Principles have achieved more victories than horsemen or chariots.—Paxton.
“It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor,” says Dickens.