Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.

The woman's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country -- with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which it is yet to be revolutionized.

... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.

It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner... I felt that I had suddenly acquired value to myself, to my family, and to the world.

Imagination is built upon knowledge.

Possibly the Creator did not make the world chiefly for the purpose of providing studies for gifted novelists; but if He had done so, we can scarcely imagine that He could have offered anything much better in the way of material.