''True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life; and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that is immortal.''
''No one is so thoroughly superstitious as the godless man.''
''Everyone confesses in the abstract that exertion which brings out all the powers of body and mind is the best thing for us all; but practically most people do all they can to get rid of it, and as a general rule nobody does much more than circumstances drive them to do.''
''Human nature is above all things—lazy.''
''A woman's health is her capital.''
''Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.''
''The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and deeds left undone.''
''All places where women are excluded tend downward to barbarism; but the moment she is introduced, there come in with her courtesy, cleanliness, sobriety, and order.''
''Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.''
''Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life's undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room, from which we go forth to more careful and guarded intercourse, leaving behind us much debris of cast-off and everyday clothing.''
''The obstinancy of cleverness and reason is nothing to the obstinancy of folly and inanity.''
''What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.''
''...care and labor are as much correlated to human existence as shadow is to light ...''
''A little reflection will enable any person to detect in himself that setness in trifles which is the result of the unwatched instinct of self-will and to establish over himself a jealous guardianship.''
''The burning of rebellious thoughts in the little breast, of internal hatred and opposition, could not long go on without slight whiffs of external smoke, such as mark the course of subterranean fire.''