Energy is more attractive than beauty in a man.
I was thinking what a curious thing love is; only a sentiment, and yet it has power to make fools of men and slaves of women.
No love or pity, pardon or excuse should soften the sharp pang of reparation for the guilty man.
Sympathy is a sweet thing.
The female population exceeds the male, you know, especially in New England, which accounts for the high state of culture we are in, perhaps.
At twenty-five, girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will. At thirty, they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact.
Power is a dangerous thing. Be careful that you don’t abuse it or let it make a tyrant of you.
I can’t get over my disappointment in not being a boy.
Elegance has a bad effect on my constitution.
Love scenes, if genuine, are indescribable; for to those who have enacted them the most elaborate description seems tame, and to those who have not, the simplest picture seems overdone.
Liberty must not be abused.
Money is a needful and precious thing.
To most the end comes as naturally and simply as sleep.
I make so many beginnings there never will be an end.
Mothers can forgive anything!
Madam de Stael pronounced architecture to be frozen music; so is statuary crystalized spirituality.
Fathers and mothers are too absorbed in business and housekeeping to study their children, and cherish that sweet and natural confidence which is a child’s surest safeguard, and a parent’s subtlest power.
I want to be great, or nothing. I won’t be a commonplace dauber, so I don’t intend to try any more.
It takes very little fire to make a great deal of smoke nowadays, and notoriety is not real glory.
Rivalry adds so much to the charms of one’s conquests.