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.

I make no manner of doubt that you threw a very diamond of truth at me, though you see it hit me so directly in the face that it wasn't exactly appreciated, at first.

True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.

The beautiful must ever rest in the arms of the sublime. The gentle needs the strong to sustain it, as much as the rock-flowers need rocks to grow on, or the ivy the rugged wall which it embraces.

To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life, is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization.

People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first. Perhaps it is impossible for a person who does no good to do no harm.

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.