What happiness is there which is not purchased with more or less of pain?

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

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.

Married people do stand up so for each other when you say a word, however they may fight between themselves.

I have my own way of dividing people, as I suppose most of us have. There are those whom I can talk to, and those whom I can't.

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

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