Money is the root of all evil, and yet it is such a useful root that we cannot get on without it any more than we can without potatoes.

Right Jo better be happy old maids than unhappy wives or unmaidenly girls running about to find husbands.

Dolls are safe companions.

Education is not confined to books, and the finest characters often graduate from no college, but make experience their master, and life their book. [Some care] only for the mental culture, and [are] in danger of over-studying, under the delusion . . . that learning must be had at all costs, forgetting that health and real wisdom are better.

But, like all happiness, it did not last long.

... swept into the giddy vortex which keeps so many young people revolving aimlessly, till they go down or are cast upon the shore, wrecks of what they might have been

All is fish that comes to the literary net. Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems, I turn my adventures into bread and butter.