The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities. – Sophocles

Would you touch a nettle without being stung by it? take hold of it stoutly. Do the same to other annoyances, and hardly will any thing annoy you. – Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers

In our nature, however, there is a provision, alike marvelous and merciful, that the sufferer should never know the intensity of what he endures by its present torture, but chiefly by the pang that rankles after it. – Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense. – Ralph Waldo Emerson