[On disagreeing with her husband about his slave-holding:] I cannot give my conscience into the keeping of another human being or submit the actions dictated by my conscience to their will.

Politics of all sorts, I confess, are far beyond my limited powers of comprehension. Those of this country as far as I have been able to observe, resolve themselves into two great motives. The aristocratic desire of elevation and separation, and the democratic desire of demolishing and levelling.

Your theory of partial immortality is abhorrent to me. I would rather disbelieve in the immortality of my own soul than suppose the boon given to me was withheld from any of my fellow creatures.

Modesty is a diamond setting to female beauty.

The spring is already here with her hands full of flowers.

cultivate in young minds an equal love of the good, the beautiful and the absurd; most people's lives are too lead-colored to lose the smallest twinkle of light from a flash of nonsense.

I never desire to know anything of the detail of political measures, lest even those which I think best should lose anything of their intrinsic value to me, by seeing what low, paltry, personal motives and base machinery and dirty hands have helped to bring them about.