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You are here: Home / Staff Picks / Thought for the Day

Thought for the Day

posted on - May 6, 2020

“The grand essentials of happiness in this life are: Something to do, something to love, and something to hope for.”

I found this in a book of quotations and aphorisms, one-a-day for a year. It must have been a gift, because it’s the kind of book people receive as a gift and never look at. But there have been a couple of times that I’ve opened up and I found something nice. This is the quotation for May 6, and I would agree that the lack of any one of those things could lead to misery. The only attribution is to its author, George Washington Burnap. Five seconds of research reveals that Burnap was a minister from Merrimack, NH, in the early 19th century. This is his most famous quotation, and it comes from Lecture IV of his 1848 “Course of Lectures”, The Sphere and Duties of Women.

In the following paragraph, Burnap quotes Rousseau on love. A week or so ago I bookmarked this article about Rousseau on writing in solitude. It was shared somewhere (the Maine Libraries listserv, I think), and I finally got around to reading it and decided to share it here.

Enjoy!

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