The perfect woman, you see [is] a working-woman; not an idler; not a fine lady; but one who [uses] her hands and her head and her heart for the good of others.

Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.

...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes

The offhand decision of some commonplace mind high in office at a critical moment influences the course of events for a hundred years.

Indifference to fate which, though it often makes a villain of a man, is the basis of his sublimity when it does not.

Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.

We learn that it is not the rays which bodies absorb, but those which they reject, that give them the colours they are known by; and in the same way people are specialized by their dislikes and antagonisms, whilst their goodwill is looked upon as no attribute at all.