A Perfect in-law relationship must be un-hampering, un-interfering,  un-criticizing

Whether we be mother or father, bride or groom, the safe rule for our happiness is to take things as we find them, take pleasure in the assets, not go searching for flaws, and not ever for a single second permit ourselves the weakness of feeling sorry for ourselves.

If we who are of yesterday (or the day before that) would have the affection of those of today given to us freely, we must ourselves be free in the sense  of being impersonally independent.

We all know that nothing is harder to build than this impersonality of mind, and one moment’s relaxed indulgence in self-pity will bring it all crashing down. The first step in the achievement of impersonality is keeping our thoughts away from every trend that is sentimentally focused upon ourselves by thinking of something else–never mind what.

The one great struggle that each and every one of us who belong alone–by that is meant all those who are widowed or single and whose children or sisters and brothers have married–must make is never to give clinging to impulses a chance to develop.

We hear much about dieting and taking daily dozens and doing all sorts of irksome things to preserve physical, and relatively little about the unrelaxing exercise of plain common sense in achieving mental beauty by adjusting the capital “I” to its relative proportion