The secret of being miserable is to have the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not. The cure is occupation.

[But that was how it was in a workaday Britain generally addicted to merit, rather than one increasingly enslaved to notions of entitlement. In the deepest part of themselves, all classes now are devoted to leisure, as if proper and difficult occupation has become one of the enemies of modern selfhood.] The secret of being miserable, ... is to have leisure to bother whether you are happy or not.

The scavenger of misery is pity.

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect

You can easily find people who are ten times as rich at sixty as they were at twenty; but not one of them will tell you that they are ten times as happy

Even the fact that doctors themselves die of the very diseases they profess to cure passes unnoticed. We do not shoot out our lips and shake our heads, saying, 'They save others: themselves they cannot save':