The soul grows into lovely habits as easily as into ugly ones, and the moment a life begins to blossom into beautiful words and deeds, that moment a new standard of conduct is established, and your eager neighbors look to you for a continuous manifestation of the good cheer, the sympathy, the ready wit, the comradeship, or the inspiration, you once showed yourself capable of. Bear figs for a season or two, and the world outside the orchard is very unwilling you should bear thistles.

A real Christmas baby was not to be lightly named.

the habit of generalizing from one particular, that mainstay of the cheap and obvious essayist, has rooted many fictions in the public eye. Nothing, for example can blot from my memory the profound, searching, and exhaustive analysis of a great nation which I learned in my small geography when I was a child, namely, 'The French are a gay and polite people fond of dancing and light wines.

It is very funny, but you do not always have to see people to love them. Just think about it, and see if it isn't so.

Father doesn't think very sudden, but he thinks awful strong.

If you make children happy now, you will make them happy twenty years hence by the memory of it.

Miranda Sawyer had a heart, of course, but she had never used it for any other purpose than the pumping and circulating of blood.