Submission to poverty is the unpardonable sin against the body. Submission to unhappiness is the unpardonable sin against the spirit.

Getting a divorce is nearly always as cheerful and useful an occupation as breaking valuable china.

The mind is its own enemy, that fights itself with the innumerable pliant and ineluctable arms of the octopus.

In England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile; on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one's own Trojan horse.

Where there is real love one wants to go to church first.