“Worry is itself a species of monomania.  No mental attitude is more disastrous to personal achievement, personal happiness, and personal usefulness in the world, than worry and its twin brother, despondency.  The remedy for the evil lies in training the will to cast off cares and seek a change of occupation, when the first warning is sounded by Nature in intellectual lassitude.  Relaxation is the certain foe of worry, and ‘don’t fret’ one of the healthiest of maxims.”

In a life of constant worrying, we are as much behind the times as if we were to go back to use the first steam engines that wasted ninety per cent. of the energy of the coal, instead of having an electric dynamo that utilizes ninety per cent. of the power.  Some people waste a large percentage of their energy in fretting and stewing, in useless anxiety, in scolding, in complaining about the weather and the perversity of inanimate things.  Others convert nearly all of their energy into power and moral sunshine.  He who has learned the true art of living will not waste his energies in friction, which accomplishes nothing, but merely grinds out the machinery of life.

It must be relegated to the debating societies to determine which is the worse—­A Nervous Man or

A worrying woman.

“I’m awfully worried this morning,” said one woman.  “What is it?” “Why, I thought of something to worry about last night, and now I can’t remember it.”

A famous actress once said:  “Worry is the foe of all beauty.”  She might have added:  “It is the foe to all health.”

“It seems so heartless in me, if I do not worry about my children,” said one mother.

Women nurse their troubles, as they do their babies.  “Troubles grow larger,” said Lady Holland, “by nursing.”

The White Knight who carried about a mousetrap, lest he be troubled with mice upon his journeys, was not unlike those who anticipate their burdens.

“He grieves,” says Seneca, “more than is necessary, who grieves before it is necessary.”

“My children,” said a dying man, “during my long life I have had a great many troubles, most of which never happened.”  A prominent business man in Philadelphia said that his father worried for twenty-five years over an anticipated misfortune which never arrived.

We try to grasp too much of life at once; since we think of it as a whole, instead of living one day at a time.  Life is a mosaic, and each tiny piece must be cut and set with skill, first one piece, then another.

A clock would be of no use as a time-keeper if it should become discouraged and come to a standstill by calculating its work a year ahead, as the clock did in Jane Taylor’s fable.  It is not the troubles of to-day, but those of to-morrow and next week and next year, that whiten our heads, wrinkle our faces, and bring us to a standstill.

“There is such a thing,” said Uncle Eben, “as too much foresight.  People get to figuring what might happen year after next, and let the fire go out and catch their death of cold, right where they are.”