Slavery may, perhaps, be best compared to the infantile disease of measles; a complaint which so commonly attacks the young of humanity in their infancy, and when gone through at that period leaves behind it so few fatal marks; but which when it normally attacks the fully developed adult becomes one of the most virulent and toxic of diseases, often permanently poisoning the constitution where it does not end in death.

If Nature here wishes to make a mountain, she runs a range for five hundred miles; if a plain, she levels eighty; if a rock, she tilts five thousand feet of strata on end; our skies are higher and more intensely blue; our waves larger than others; our rivers fiercer. There is nothing measured, small nor petty in South Africa.

Love, smoke and a cough cannot long be hid!

Marriage has been a very rich and beautiful development of my life. Month by month as we live together we seem to come nearer to each other; and to feel a more complete fellowship. I do not feel that it in any way fetters or narrows my world: - it seems rather to enlarge it.

No woman who is a woman says of a human body, 'it is nothing' ... On this one point, and on this point alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he does not.

[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 . . .

A word may become so defiled by bad use that it will take a century before it can be purifed, and brought into use again.