When men speak ill of thee, live so as nobody may believe them. –Plato

The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

I cannot stress too deeply the importance of one's constructive mental attitude toward life. One gets out of life only what one puts into it; everything must be seeded in different degrees. Always express happy thoughts and keep an uncomplaining mind. A complaining mind is a destructive one-destructive to health and happiness. How easily we may be made unhappy depends upon the weakness and ignorance of our own minds. Happy thoughts expressed are like the sunbeams that create warmth-that stimulate one's sense of well being and make us feel happy. Give happiness and you will receive it in return: it is a natural phenomenon of a balanced and well-ordered mind. Do not complain; instead seek the solution to the problem, and then you can do something constructive about it. This can best be accomplished by forgetting self; too much false value is placed upon self and personality, thus developing an overrated and inflated ego that sees all things in proportion to its own ignorance. –Alfred J. Parker

There exists, if I am not mistaken, an entire world which is the totality of mathematical truths, to which we have access only with our mind, just as a world of physical reality exists, the one like the other independent of ourselves, both of divine creation. –Charles Hermite