To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

They were afraid never having learned what I taught myself: Defeat the fear of death and welcome the death of fear.

We take our kids for physical vaccinations dental exams eye checkups. When do we think to take our - our son or daughter for a mental health checkup?

The first draught serveth for health the second for pleasure the third for shame and the fourth for madness.

The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.

By mere burial man arrives not at bliss and in the future life throughout its whole infinite range they will seek for happiness as vainly as they sought it here who seek it in aught else than that which so closely surrounds them here - the Infinite.

The secular world looks to the church and to its chagrin finds no love no life no laughter no hope and no happiness.

As a bookish child in Calcutta I used to thrill to the adventures of bad girls whose pursuit of happiness swept them outside the bounds of social decency. Tess of the d'Urbervilles Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina lived large in my imagination. The naughty girls of Hollywood films flirted and knew how to drive.

Some of us learned in a school of philosophy which taught that all was for the common good and nothing for oneself and have never in any case regarded the pursuit of happiness as anything other than an aberration of the human spirit.

The sound of laughter is like the vaulted dome of a temple of happiness.

Unhappiness is something we are never taught about we are taught to expect happiness but never a Plan B to use to use when the happiness doesn't arrive.

I have discovered the secret of happiness - it is work either with the hands or the head. The moment I have something to do the draughts are open and my chimney draws and I am happy.

Happiness in this world when it comes comes incidentally. Make it the object of pursuit and it leads us a wild-goose chase and is never attained. Follow some other object and very possibly we may find that we have caught happiness without dreaming of it.

Live by this credo: have a little laugh at life and look around you for happiness instead of sadness. Laughter has always brought me out of unhappy situations.

As the mother of two daughters I have great respect for women. And I don't ever want to lose that.

Fables should be taught as fables myths as myths and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

In any crass political calculation drilling for oil will always win more votes than putting a price on carbon. But if I recall what I was taught in fifth-grade American government class we elect presidents to do more than crass political calculations.

I believe that love and laughter can only happen when one person takes the time to think about what would cause the other person to feel good.

It's not vanity to feel you have a right to be beautiful. Women are taught to feel we're not good enough that we must live up to someone else's standards. But my aim is to cherish myself as I am.

Yet taught by time my heart has learned to glow for other's good and melt at other's woe.

Richard Nixon is a no good lying bastard. He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time and if he ever caught himself telling the truth he'd lie just to keep his hand in.

I would rather lose a good earring than be caught without make-up.

No man is so foolish but he may sometimes give another good counsel and no man so wise that he may not easily err if he takes no other counsel than his own. He that is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.