In intimate family life, there comes a moment when children, willingly or no, become the judges of their parents.

Clothes are like a gloss that sets off everything; dresser were invented more to enhance physical advantages than to veil physical defects.

A careful observation of Nature will disclose pleasantries of superb irony. She has for instance placed toads close to flowers.

A sick man, surrounded by those who love him, nursed by those who wish earnestly that he should live, will recover (all other things being equal), when another patient tended by hirelings will die. Doctors decline to see unconscious magnestism in this phenomenon; for them it is the result of intelligent nursing, of exact obedience to their orders; but many a mother knows the virtue of such ardent projections of strong, unceasing prayer.

Life cannot go on without much forgetting.

A woman must be a genius to create a good husband.

I declare, on my soul and conscience, that the attainment of power, or of a great name in literature, seemed to me an easier victory than a success with some young, witty, and gracious lady of high degree.