"To be glad of life because it gives you the chance to love and to work and to play and to look up at the stars; to be satisfied with your possessions, but not contented with yourself until you have made the best of them; to despise nothing in the world except falsehood and meanness, and to fear nothing except cowardice; to be governed by your admirations rather than by your disgusts; to covet nothing that is your neighbour's except his kindness of heart and gentleness of manners; to think seldom of your enemies, often of your friends, and every day of Christ; and to spend as much time as you can, with body and with spirit, in God's out-of-doors—these are little guideposts on the foot-path to peace."
Henry Van Dyke.
"O Lord, that lends me life, lend me a heart replete with thankfulness."
Shakespeare.
JANUARY 9
"He who lives without a definite purpose achieves no higher end than to serve as a warning to others. He is a kind of bell-buoy, mournfully tolled by the waves of circumstance, to mark the rocks or shoals which are to be avoided."
"Surely there is something to be done from morning till night, and to find out what is the appointed work of the onward-tending soul."
Fanny Kemble.
"I ask you while hope is still fresh and enthusiasm unchilled to gain some conception of the solemnity, the vastness, the unity, the purpose of life: to pause in the street or on the river bank and ask yourselves what that strange stream of pleasure and frivolity and sorrow and vice means, and means to you: to reflect that you are bound by intelligible bonds to every suffering, sinning man and woman: to learn, while the lesson is comparatively easy, the secret of human sympathy: to search after some of the essential relationships of man to man: to interpret a little of the worth of even trivial labour: to grow sensitive to the feelings of the poor: to grow considerate to the claims of the weak."