It is difficult to be emphatic when no one is emphatic on the other side.

The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.

What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.

There isn't a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own.

One discovers a friend by chance, and cannot but feel regret that 20 or 30 years of life may have been spent without the least knowledge of him.

Women are not as sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature, being less poetical, and having less imagination; they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make fewer failures in business.

The most popular persons are those who take the world as it is who find the least fault.