Ignorance ... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth.

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.

I'm not one of those that can see the cat in the dairy and wonder what she's there for.