The winter's frost must rend the burr of the nut before the fruit is seen. So adversity tempers the human heart, to discover its real worth.

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

And he, like many jaded people, had few pleasures left in life save good food and drink.

Envy is the most stupid of vices, for there is no single advantage to be gained from it.

Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.

The more illegal a profit, the more tenaciously a man clings to it.

A knowledge of mankind and of things that surround us gives us that second education which proves far move valuable than our first because it alone turns out a truly accomplished man.