If you would increase your happiness and prolong your life, forget
your neighbor's faults. Forget all the slander you have ever heard.
Forget the temptations. Forget the fault finding, and give a little
thought to the cause which provoked it. Forget the peculiarities
of your friends, and only remember the good points which make
you fond of them. Forget all personal quarrels or histories you
may have heard by accident, and which, if repeated, would seem
a thousand times worse than they are. Blot out as far as possible
all the disagreeables of life; they will come, but will only grow
larger when you remember them, and the constant thought of the
acts of meanness, or, worse still, malice, will only tend to make
you more familiar with them. Obliterate everything disagreeable
from yesterday, start out with a clean sheet today, and write
upon it for sweet memory's sake only those things which are lovely
and lovable.
— Clermont Herald
— Rays from the Rose Cross Magazine, January/February, 1996