About the greatest virtue a friend can have, is to be able to hold her tongue; and through this, like all virtues carried to extremity, may grow into a fault, and do great harm, still, it never can do so much harm as that horrible laxity and profligacy of speech which is a the root of half the quarrels, cruelties, and injustices of the world.

Ethics, as has been well said, are the finest fruits of humanity, but they are not its roots

We have not to construct human nature afresh, but to take it as we find it, and make the best of it.

It is a curious truth - and yet a truth forced upon us by daily observation - that it is not the women who have suffered most who are the unhappy women. A state of permanent unhappiness - not the morbid, half-cherished melancholy of youth, which generally wears off with wiser years, but that settled, incurable discontent and dissatisfaction with all things and all people, which we see in some women, is, with very rare exceptions, at once the index and the exponent of a thoroughly selfish character.

absence ... smothers into decay a rootless fancy but often nourishes the least seed of a true affection into full-flowering love.

Not perhaps until later life, until the follies, passions, and selfishness of youth have died out, do we . . . recognize the the inestimable blessing, the responsibility awful as sweet, of possessing or of being a friend.

A person who is careless about money is careless about everything, and untrustworthy in everything.