Once you grow accustomed to being famous, you do not realize it, but you are never quite your humble, honest self. No matter how tightly you keep the lid on, there is some watered stock of vanity inside. You are always in danger of the thing's coming off and of giving yourself an air or two. No man or woman was ever so distinguished that this exhibition did not make him ridiculous, especially to those of meaner minds.

No one has yet had the courage to memorialize his wealth on his tombstone. A dollar mark would not look well there.

There is something in the quality of the French mind to which I have always felt a reluctant kinship. They are the only people I know who can leap into an enormous vocabulary of words and beat them up with the wings of their spirit into a fine hysterical eloquence.

I think now happiness is a thing you practice like music until you have skill in striking the right notes on time. We have no vocation for it. And I had no practice, not a day when I was free from care and one great anxiety - and one must be free to be happy. I know that much about it by having missed it.

if one's natural feelings are suppressed long enough one develops supernatural feelings and feels surer of having a soul.

I was not too stupid to learn, but too smart. Some instinct must have warned me that a woman accomplished in the domestic arts is frequently enslaved by them.

I believe if we can wait long enough that every honorable sorrow will become a kind of joy.