And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?

The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.

There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.