The distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society is a calm, imperturbable quiet which pervades all their actions and habits, from the greatest to the least. They eat in quiet, move in quiet, live in quiet, and lose their wife, or even their money, in quiet; while low persons cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise about it.

The food of hope is meditative action.

The haughty woman who can stand alone, and requires no leaning-place in our hearts, loses the spell of her sex.

When you borrow on your character, it is your character that you leave in pawn.

Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.

Our very wretchedness grows dear to us when suffering for one we love.

There is no past, as long as books shall live. Books make the past our heritage and our home.