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

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

A parent, unlike a poet, is not born - he is made.

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

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.

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

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