Go forward with joyful confidence.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.

For character too is a process and an unfoldingamong our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!