Society is like a lawn, where every roughness is smoothed, every bramble eradicated, and where the eye is delighted by the smiling verdure of a velvet surface

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced.

A barking dog is often more useful than a sleeping lion.

There is an enduring tenderness in the love of a mother to a son that trancends all other affections of the heart

I profess not to know how women's hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration.

No man knows what the wife of his bosom is until he has gone with her through the fiery trials of this world.

When the Gauls laid waste Rome, they found the senators clothed in their robes, and seated in stern tranquillity in their curule chairs; in this manner they suffered death without resistance or supplication. Such conduct was in them applauded as noble and magnanimous; in the hapless Indians it was reviled as both obstinate and sullen. How truly are we the dupes of show and circumstances! How different is virtue, clothed in purple and enthroned in state, from virtue, naked and destitute, and perishing obscurely in a wilderness.