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.

We are all of us very perfect creatures so long as we are not tried.

Better no marriage, than a marriage short of the best.

It is astonishing what a lot of odd minutes one can catch during the day, if one really sets about it.

The wonder is not that some married people are less happy than they hoped to be, but that any married people, out of the honeymoon, or even in it, are ever happy at all.

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.

... what a fatal thing in pictures, books, or human lives, is a lack of proportion.