[Finishing schools] are nicely adapted machines for experimenting on the question, "Into how little space a human being can be crushed?" I have seen some souls so compressed that they would have fitted into a small thimble, and found room to move . . .

They are called finishing-schools and the name tells accurately what they are. They finish everything.

We are a race of women that of old knew no fear and feared no death, and lived great lives and hoped great hopes; and if today some of us have fallen on evil and degenerate times, there moves in us yet the throb of the old blood.

There's something so beautiful in coming on one's very inmost thoughts in another. In one way it is one of the greatest pleasures one has.

No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted.

genius has no limit of sex or race.

For those of us who have a ground of knowledge which we cannot transmit to outsiders, it is perhaps more profitable to act fearlessly than to argue.