"Certainly I believe that God gave us life for happiness, not misery. Humanity, I am sure, will never be made lazy or indifferent by an excess of happiness. Many persons have a wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose. Happiness should be a means of accomplishment, like health, not an end in itself."

"The poets have taught us how full of wonders is the night; and the night of blindness has its wonders, too. The only lightless dark is the night of ignorance and insensibility. We differ, blind and seeing, one from another, not in our senses, but in the use we make of them, in the imagination and courage with which we seek wisdom beyond our senses."

"True happiness... is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."

"The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next."

"Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world."

"Hold out your hands to feel the luxury of sunbeams. Press the soft blossoms against your cheek, and finger their graces of form, their delicate mutability of shape, their pliancy and freshness. Expose your face to the aerial floods that sweep the heavens, 'inhale great draughts of space,' wonder, wonder at the wind's unwearied activity. Pile note on note the infinite music that flows increasingly to your soul from the tactual sonorities of a thousand branches and tumbling waters. How can the world be shriveled when this most profound, emotional sense, touch, is faithful to its service? I am sure that if a fairy bade me choose between the sense of sight and that of touch, I would not part with the warm, endearing contact of human hands."

"Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful."

"I believe that life is given us so that we may grow in love and I believe that God is in me as the sun is in the color and fragrance of a flower."

"Happiness does not come from without, it comes from within."

"Science may have found a cure for most evils; but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings."

"For one wild, glad moment we snapped the chain that binds us to earth, and joining hands with the winds we felt ourselves divine."

"Masculine exhalations are, as a rule, stronger, more vivid,more widely differentiated than those of women. In the odor of young men there is something elemental, as of fire, storm, and salt sea. It pulsates with buoyancy and desire. It suggests all the things strong and beautiful and joyous and gives me a sense of physical happiness."

"The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision."

"Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived."

"It is hard to interest those who have everything in those who have nothing."

"It is better to be happy for a moment and be burned up with beauty than to live a long time and be bored all the while."

"Once I knew the depth where no hope was, and darkness lay on the face of all things. Then love came and set my soul free."

"Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence."

"Cut off as I am, it is inevitable that I should sometimes feel like a shadow walking in a shadowy world. When this happens I ask to be taken to New York City. Always I return home weary but I have the comforting certainty that mankind is real flesh and I myself am not a dream."

"For years to come the debris of a convulsed world will beset our steps. It will require a purpose stronger than any man and worthy of all men to calm and inspirit us. A sane society whose riches are happy children, men and women, beautiful with peace and creative activity, is not going to be ordained for us. We must make it ourselves."

"What does this beauty or than music mean to you? You cannot see the waves rolling up the beach or hear their roar. What do they mean to you?' In the most evident sense they mean everything. I cannot fathom or define their meaning any more than I can fathom or define love or religion or goodness."

"A bend in the road is not the end of the road. Unless you fail to make the turn."

"College isn't the place to go for ideas."

"Life is an exciting business, and most exciting when it is lived for others."

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see a shadow."

"I seldom think about my limitations, and they never make me sad. Perhaps there is just a touch of yearning at times; but it is vague, like a breeze among flowers."

"As selfishness and complaint pervert the mind, so love with its joy clears and sharpens the vision."

"Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle."

"There is plenty of courage among us for the abstract but not for the concrete."

"I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light."

"I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not refuse to do something that I can do."

"Believe when you are most unhappy that there is something for you to do in the world. So long as you can sweeten another's pain life is not in vain."

"The highest result of education is tolerance."

"While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done."

"It is a terrible thing to see and have no vision."

"I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden. I can see a God-made world, not a manmade world."

"There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors and no slave who has not had a king among his."

"Sometimes, it is true, a sense of isolation enfolds me like a cold mist as I sit alone and wait at life's shut gate. Beyond there is light, and music, and sweet companionship; but I may not enter. Fate, silent, pitiless, bars the way. Silence sits immense upon my soul. Then comes hope with a smile and whispers, 'there is joy is self-forgetfulness.' So I try to make the light in others' eyes my sun, the music in others; ears my symphony, the smile on others' lips my happiness."

"Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee..."

"Doubts and mistrust are the mere panic of timid imagination which the steadfast heart will conquer and the large mind transcend."

"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."

"Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood."

"People don't like to think, if one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant."

"Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!"

"We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only joy in the world."

"Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves - and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves either."

"I who am blind can give one hint to those who see: Use your eyes as if tomorrow you would be stricken blind. And the same method can be applied to the other senses. Hear the music of voices, the song of a bird, the mighty strains of an orchestra, as if you would be stricken deaf tomorrow. Touch each object as if tomorrow your tactile sense would fail. Smell the perfume of flowers, taste with relish each morsel, as if tomorrow you could never smell and taste again. make the most of every sense; glory in the beauty which the world in all the facets of pleasure reveals to you through the several means of contact which Nature provides. But of all the senses, I am sure that sight is the most delightful."

"True happiness ... is not attained through self-gratification but through fidelity to a worthy purpose."

"Truly I have looked into the very heart of darkness, and refused to yield to its paralyzing influence, but in spirit I am one of those who walk the morning. What if all dark, discouraging moods of the human mind come across my way as thick as the dry leaves of autumn? Other feet have traveled that road before me, and I know the desert leads to god as surely as the green, refreshing fields, and orchards."

"I am conscious of a soul-sense that lifts me above the narrow, cramping circumstances of my life. My physical limitations are forgotten- my world lies upward, the length and the breadth and the sweep of the heavens are mine!"