As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.

Morally a woman has a right to the free and entire development of every faculty which God has given her to be improved and used to His honor. Socially she has a right to the protection of equal laws; the right to labor with her hands the thing that is good; to select the kind of labor which is in harmony with her condition and her powers; to exist, if need be, by her labor, or to profit others by it if she choose. These are her rights, not more nor less than the rights of the man.

Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.

A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious.

Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.