Life has a certain flavor for those who have fought and risked all that the sheltered and protected can never experience.

Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

What is contrary to women's nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play.

All desirable things... are desirable either for the pleasure inherent in themselves, or as a means to the promotion of pleasure and the prevention of pain.

If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them all after one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development, and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the varieties of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere and climate.

Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil; there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend to only one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood.

Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy.