There are two classes of human beings in this world: one class seem made to give love, and the other to take it.

Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.

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

the Lord gives good many things twice over; but he don't give ye a mother but once.

That ignorant confidence in one's self and one's future, which comes in life's first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to.

Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.

The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.