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

For truly, the greatest of all external blessings is it to be able to lean your heart against another heart, faithful, tender, true, and tried, and record with a thankfulness that years deepen instead of diminishing, "I have got a friend!"

A perfect marriage is as rare as a perfect love. Could it be otherwise, when both men and women are so imperfect? Could aught else be expected? Yet all do expect it.

To have loved and lost, either by that total disenchantment which leaves compassion as the sole substitute for love which can exist no more, or by the slow torment which is obliged to let go day by day all that constitutes the diviner part of love - namely, reverence, belief, and trust, yet clings desperately to the only thing left it, a long-suffering apologetic tenderness - this lot is probably the hardest any woman can have to bear.

there is nothing so absolute as the tyranny of weakness.

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

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