Temptations come, as a general rule, when they are sought.

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.

Every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that which comes after it.

Imagination is the first faculty wanting in those that do harm to their kind.

A hotel is a hotel all the world over, a place essentially vulgar, commonplace, venal, the travesty of a human home.

I suppose every generation has a conceit of itself which elevates it, in its own opinion, above that which comes after it. (The Open Door).

Perhaps, on the whole, embarrassment and perplexity are a kind of natural accompaniment to life and movement; and it is better to be driven out of your senses with thinking which of two things you ought to do than to do nothing whatever, and be utterly uninteresting to all the world.

Laughing is not the first expression of joy. ... A person laughs in idleness, for fun, not for joy. Joy has nothing, nothing but the old way of tears.

Truly there is nothing in the world so blessed or so sweet as the heritage of children.

One only says it is one's duty when one has something disagreeable to do.

Up to this date, I have never been shut up in a separate room, or hedged off with any observances. My study, all the study I have attained to, is the little 2nd drawing room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on; and I don't think I have ever had two hours undisturbed (except at night, when everybody is in bed) during my whole literary life.

Somehow even a popular fallacy has an aspect of truth when it suits one's own case.

For everybody knows that it requires very little to satisfy the gentlemen, if a woman will only give her mind to it.

He was highly spoken of, everybody knew; but nobody knew who had spoken highly of him.

Oh, never mind the fashion. When one has a style of one's own, it is always twenty times better.

The incomprehensibleness of women is an old theory, but what is that to the curious wondering observation with which wives, mothers, and sisters watch the other unreasoning animal in those moments when he has snatched the reins out of their hands, and is not to be spoken to! . It is best to let him come to, and feel his own helplessness.

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.

Even in misery we love to be foremost, to have the bitter in our cup acknowledged as more bitter than that of others.

Good works may only be beautiful sins, if they are not done in a true spirit.

Against the long years when family bonds make up all that is happiest in life, there must always be reckoned those moments of agitation and revolution, during which the bosom of a family is the most unrestful and disturbing place in existence.