Mud-pies gratify one of our first and best instincts. So long as we are dirty, we are pure.

There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.

The stranger who receives the rare gift of human kindness holds its value in his heart forever.

Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue.

There was never a nation that became great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.

The principal value of a garden is not understood. It is not to give the possessors vegetables and fruit (that can be better and cheaper done by the market-gardeners), but to teach him patience and philosophy, and the higher virtues - hope deferred, and expectations blighted, leading directly to resignation, and sometimes to alienation.

Nothing shows one who his friends are like prosperity and ripe fruit.