He alone is the happy man who has learned to extract happiness, not from ideal conditions, but from the actual ones about him.  The man who has mastered the secret will not wait for ideal surroundings; he will not wait until next year, next decade, until he gets rich, until he can travel abroad, until he can afford to surround himself with works of the great masters; but he will make the most out of life to-day, where he is.

    “Why thus longing, thus forever sighing,
      For the far-off, unattained and dim,
    While the beautiful, all round thee lying,
      Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?

    “Happy the man, and happy he alone,
      He who can call to-day his own;
    He who, secure within himself, can say: 
      ‘To-morrow, do thy worst, for I have lived to-day!’”

Paradise is here or nowhere:  you must take your joy with you or you will never find it.

It is after business hours, not in them, that men break down.  Men must, like Philip Armour, turn the key on business when they leave it, and at once unlock the doors of some wholesome recreation.  Dr. Lyman Beecher used to divert himself with a violin.  He had a regular system of what he called “unwinding,” thus relieving the great strain put upon him.

“A man,” says Dr. Johnson, “should spend part of his time with the laughers.”

Humor was Lincoln’s life-preserver, as it has been of thousands of others.  “If it were not for this,” he used to say, “I should die.”  His jests and quaint stories lighted the gloom of dark hours of national peril.

“Next to virtue,” said Agnes Strickland, “the fun in this world is what we can least spare.”

“When the harness is off,” said Judge Haliburton, “a critter likes to kick up his heels.”

“I have fun from morning till night,” said the editor Charles A. Dana to a friend who was growing prematurely old.  “Do you read novels, and play billiards, and walk a great deal?”

Gladstone early formed a habit of looking on the bright side of things, and never lost a moment’s sleep by worrying about public business.

There are many out-of-door sports, and the very presence of nature is to many a great joy.  How true it is that, if we are cheerful and contented, all nature smiles with us,—­the air seems more balmy, the sky more clear, the earth has a brighter green, the trees have a richer foliage, the flowers are more fragrant, the birds sing more sweetly, and the sun, moon, and stars all appear more beautiful.  “It is a grand thing to live,—­to open the eyes in the morning and look out upon the world, to drink in the pure air and enjoy the sweet sunshine, to feel the pulse bound, and the being thrill with the consciousness of strength and power in every nerve; it is a good thing simply to be alive, and it is a good world we live in, in spite of the abuse we are fond of giving it.”