All my life long I have been sensible of the injustice constantly done to women. Since I have had to fight the world single-handed, there has not been one day I have not smarted under the wrongs I have had to bear, because I was not only a woman, but a woman doing a man's work, without any man, husband, son, brother or friend, to stand at my side, and to see some semblance of justice done me. I cannot forget, for injustice is a sixth sense, and rouses all the others.

No man was ever ruined from without; the final ruin comes from within, when you turn hopeless and lose courage!

A poverty that is universal may be cheerfully borne; it is an individual poverty that is painful and humiliating.

A man nearly sixty is just as ready to suppose himself fascinating as a man of twenty.

I wear the key of memory, and can open every door in the house of my life.

That is the great mistake about the affections. It is not the rise and fall of empires, the birth and death of kings, or the marching of armies that move them most. When they answer from their depths, it is to the domestic joys and tragedies of life.

... if fiction does not show us a better life than reality, what is the good of it?