Not infrequently, when a man asks a woman to marry him, he means that he wants her to help him love himself, and if, blinded by her own feeling, she takes him for her captain, her pleasure craft becomes a pirate ship, the colours change to a black flag with a sinister sign, and her inevitable destiny is the coral reef.

There is a great deal of trouble in this world which is not caused by people keeping their mouths shut.

The fine gifts of temperament and imagination which are essential to the production of true poetry are often accompanied by morbid sensibility. The soul capable of ecstasy and transport must pay its price in suffering; he who walks upon the heights must sometimes grovel in the dust.

After the door of a woman's heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it.

... no matter how one's heart aches, one can do the necessary things and do them well.

Gossip is the social mosquito.

Making an issue of a little thing is one of the surest ways to spoil happiness.