... it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them.

One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.