Fairy roses, fairy rings, turn out sometimes troublesome things.

Young ladies may have been crossed in love, and have had their sufferings, their frantic moments of grief and tears, their wakeful nights, and so forth; but it is only in very sentimental novels that people occupy themselves perpetually with that passion, and I believe what are called broken hearts are a very rare article indeed.

It's a great comfort to some people to groan over their imaginary ills.

Let a man who has to make his fortune in life remember this maxim: Attacking is the only secret. Dare and the world yields, or if it beats you sometimes, dare it again and you will succeed.

Out of the fictitious book I get the expression of the life, of the times, of the manners, of the merriment, of the dress, the pleasure, the laughter, the ridicules of society. The old times live again. Can the heaviest historian do more for me?

In effective womanly beauty form is more than face, and manner more than either.

If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations.