the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling cradles with changelings.

the delicacy that respects a friend's silence is one of the charms of life.

...the heart has no tears to give,--it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.

I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people's glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.

Your little child is the only true democrat.

I don't know as I am fit for anything and I have thought that I could wish to die young and let the remembrance of me and my faults perish in the grave rather than live, as I fear I do, a trouble to everyone.... Sometimes I could not sleep and have groaned and cried till midnight.

Where painting is weakest, namely, in the expression of the highest moral and spiritual ideas, there music is sublimely strong.