Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others.

I think reading a novel is almost next best to having something to do.

Truly there is nothing in the world so blessed or so sweet as the heritage of children.

For everybody knows that it requires very little to satisfy the gentlemen, if a woman will only give her mind to it.

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.

... I have always been a disappointment to my friends. I have no gift of talk, not much to say; and though I have always been an excellent listener, that only succeeds under auspicious circumstances.

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.