One of the principal goals in my life has been to avoid embarrassing my children by doing the job I do. I hope I've managed to do that and I hope that with the job I'm in now they are if not proud at least unembarrassed by it. I must say my three are most agreeable children who do nothing but delight me.

Hope deceiving as it is serves at least to lead us to the end of our lives by an agreeable route.

Happiness: an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

I do not want people to be very agreeable as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

Friendship is the source of the greatest pleasures and without friends even the most agreeable pursuits become tedious.

Don't flatter yourself that friendship authorizes you to say disagreeable things to your intimates. The nearer you come into relation with a person the more necessary do tact and courtesy become.

Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom when it comes not merely philosophically but almost with pleasure.

Freedom isn't free. It shouldn't be a bragging point that 'Oh I don't get involved in politics ' as if that makes someone cleaner. No that makes you derelict of duty in a republic. Liars and panderers in government would have a much harder time of it if so many people didn't insist on their right to remain ignorant and blindly agreeable.

In this connection faith and experience teach us many truths by means of the short-cut of authority and by the proofs of very pleasant and agreeable feelings.

My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings.