Everything but truth becomes loathed in a sick-room ... Let the nurse avow that the medicine is nauseous. Let the physician declare that the treatment will be painful. Let sister, or brother, or friend, tell me that I must never look to be well. When the time approaches that I am to die, let me be told that I am to die, and when.

Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry.

I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart's-love for legal prostitution.

The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.

Marriage ... is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient.

Readers are plentiful; thinkers are rare.

if I believed that the choice lay between a sacrifice of the completest order of biography and that of the inviolability of private epistolary correspondence, I could not hesitate for a moment. I would keep the old and precious privacy,-the inestimable right of every one who has a friend and can write to him, - I would keep our written confidence from being made biographical material, as anxiously as I would keep our spoken conversation from being noted down for the good of society.