Those who have lived in a house with spoiled children must have a lively recollection of the degree of torment they can inflict upon all who are within sight or hearing.

The human heart, at whatever age, opens to the heart that opens in return.

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with extraordinary frequency - it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn: in every conversation that we hear in every book we open, in every newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised, and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences.

a straight line is the shortest possible line between any two points - an axiom equally true in morals as in mathematics.

why will friends publish all the trash they can scrape together of celebrated people?

Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.

If young women were not deceived into a belief that affectation pleases, they would scarcely trouble themselves to practise it so much.