But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

One has to spend so many years in learning how to be happy. I am just beginning to make some progress in the science, and I hope to disprove Young's theory that "as soon as we have found the key of life it opes the gates of death." Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead. I never will believe that our youngest days are our happiest. What a miserable augury for the progress of the race and the destination of the individual if the more matured and enlightened state is the less happy one!