I fear, the inevitable conclusion we must all come to is, that in the world happiness is quite indefinable. We can no more grasp it than we can grasp the sun in the sky or the moon in the water. We can feel it interpenetrating our whole being with warmth and strength; we can see it in a pale reflection shining elsewhere; or in its total absence, we, walking in darkness, learn to appreciate what it is by what it is not.

When faith and hope fail, as they do sometimes, we must try charity, which is love in action. We must speculate no more on our duty, but simply do it. When we have done it, however blindly, perhaps Heaven will show us why.

A lost love. Deny it who will, ridicule it, treat it as mere imagination and sentiment, the thing is and will be; and women do suffer therefrom, in all its infinite varieties: loss by death, by faithlessness or unworthiness, and by mistaken or unrequited affection.

How the sting of poverty, or small means, is gone when one keeps house for one's own comfort and not for the comfort of one's neighbors.

Why cannot one always do, not only the right thing, but at the right time?

Oh, the comfort - the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person - having neither to weigh thoughts nor to measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together.

Happiness is not an end - it is only a means, and adjunct, a consequence.