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

Terror of being found out is not always a preservative, it sometimes hurries on the act which it ought to prevent.

every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that which comes after it.

I scarcely remember any writer who has ever ventured to say that the half of the work of the world is actually accomplished by women; and very few husbands who would be otherwise than greatly startled and amazed, if not indignant, if not derisive, at the suggestion of such an idea as that the work of their wives was equal to their own.

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.

To have a man who can flirt is next thing to indispensable to a leader of society.

Against the long years when family bonds make up all that is happiest in life, there must always be reckoned those moments of agitation and revolution, during which the bosom of a family is the most unrestful and disturbing place in existence.