The happy marriage, which is the only proper nursery, is indissoluble. The unhappy marriage, which perpetually tells the child a bogey-man story about life, ought to be dissolved.

Men must be capable of imagining and executing and insisting on social change if they are to reform or even maintain civilization, and capable too of furnishing the rebellion which is sometimes necessary if society is not to perish of immobility.

I always have beauty around me, for I have but to go to my piano, and trace one of the million designs that have been made by my masters.

Birds sat on the telegraph wires that spanned the river as the black notes sit on a staff of music.

Did St. Francis preach to the birds? Whatever for? If he really liked birds he would have done better to preach to the cats.

The American struggle for the vote was much more difficult than the English for the simple reason that it was much more easy.

[On Jane Austen:] To believe her limited in range because she was harmonious in method is as sensible as to imagine that when the Atlantic Ocean is as smooth as a mill-pond it shrinks to the size of a mill-pond.