The test of a good letter is a very simple one. If one seems to hear the other person talking as one reads, it is a good letter..

The moment that any life, however good, stifles you, you may be sure it isn't your real life..

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality - the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, h….

I think I feel rather differently about sympathy to what seems the normal view. I like just to feel it is there, but not always expressed..

People seldom refuse help, if one offers it in the right way..

There remain times when one can only endure. One lives on, one doesn't die, and the only thing that one can do, is to fill one's mind and time as far….

People who deal with life generously and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to the end..

Congenial labor is the secret of happiness..

A well begun is half ended..

As I make my slow pilgrimage through the world, a certain sense of beautiful mystery seems to gather and grow..

Keeping up appearances is the most expensive thing in the world..

It is often wonderful how putting down on paper a clear statement of a case helps one to see, not perhaps the way out, but the way in..

Do you know the times when one seems to stick fast in circumstances like the fly in the jam-pot? It can't be helped, and I suppose the best thing to ….

I never enter a new company without the hope that I may discover a friend, perhaps the friend, sitting there with an expectant smile. That hope survi….

What a strange power the perception of beauty is! It seems to ebb and flow like some secret tide, independent alike of health and disease, of joy or ….

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears..

I have known some quite good people who were unhappy, but never an interested person who was unhappy..

I believe in instinct, not reason. When reason is right, nine times out of ten it is impotent, and when it prevails, nine times out of ten it is wron….

It seems sometimes as if one were powerless to do any more from within to overcome troubles, and that help must come from without..

A diary need not be a dreary chronicle of one's movements; it should aim rather at giving salient account of some particular episode, a walk, a book,….

Readjusting is a painful process, but most of us need it at one time or another..