Memory may be a hell or a paradise. It depends on whether you spend your youth manufacturing brimstone or planting roses.
When I hear a man trying to do all the talking for the crowd, I remember that a drum makes more noise than a cask of sugar, because it is empty.
A man is a fool to worry about his “past,” if he has one. A man or woman with a “past” isn’t half so badly off as the sinner who yet has “something coming to him.”
I don’t believe in rejecting and despising a man because of his faults. Make them useful to him. For example, a conceited man is like a tire, which is of no earthly account until it is inflated.
One of the meanest things about sowing wild oats is that the profligate scatters about half the seed on some good man’s wheat field. And more than half the wild oats turn out to be rye.