Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.