It is not the smallest use to try to make people good, unless you try at the same time - and they feel that you are trying - to make them happy. And you rarely can make another happy, unless you are happy yourself.

Our natural and happiest life is when we lose ourselves in the exquisite absorption of home, the delicious retirement of dependent love.

This is practically the language used to fallen women, and chiefly by their own sex: "God may forgive you, but we never can!" - a declaration which, however common, in spirit if not in substance, is, when one comes to analyse it, unparalleled in its arrogance of blasphemy. That for a single offence, however grave, a whole life should be blasted, is a doctrine repugnant even to Nature's own dealings in the visible world.

... it does not do to tell great people anything unpleasant.

Queens you must always be: queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons, queens of higher mystery to the world beyond. . . . But alas, you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest.

The man who does his work, any work, conscientiously, must always be in one sense a great man.

There is no sorrow under heaven which is, or ought to be, endless. To believe or to make it so, is an insult to Heaven itself.