The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

We cannot reform our forefathers.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.

I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.

bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.