A bird is joy incarnate.

The body grows by food and work, the mind by use, and the soul through joy and pain.

I experienced the discomfort of those who have moved mentally, but are still clamped, physically, to the places they have moved from.

Womankind suffers from three delusions: marriage will reform a man, a rejected lover is heartbroken for life, and if the other women were only out of the way, he would come back.

Youth asks no greater privilege than to fight its own battles. It is mistaken kindness to shield -- it weakens one in the years to come.

No woman need fear the effect of absence upon the man who honestly loves her. The needle of the compass, regardless of intervening seas, points forever toward the north. Pitiful indeed is she who fails to be a magnet and blindly becomes a chain.

Three things I have longed to see ... The sea serpent, a white rhinoceros, and an unselfish man.

Nothing is bad which does not harm either you or someone else.

Conceit is lovable and unconcealed ; vanity is supreme selfishness, usually hidden.

Anger is a better weapon than tears; a burr commands more respect than a sensitive plant.

It is personal vanity of the most flagrant type which intrudes itself, unasked, into other people's affairs. There are few of us who do not feel capable of ordering the daily lives of others, down to the most minute detail.

Heart-aches are forgotten, tears lose their bitterness, and like a leaf of lavendar in a store of linen, so does Memory make life sweet.

After the door of a woman's heart has once swung on its silent hinges, a man thinks he can prop it open with a brick and go away and leave it.

But somewhere on the great world the sun is always shining, and, just so sure as you live, it will sometime shine on you.

In every life there is a perfect moment, like a flash of sun. We can shape our days by that, if we will -- before by faith, and afterward by memory.

When we get civilised, I believe children will go by number until they get old enough to choose their own names.

Before, you think of it as a permanent bond of happiness; later, you see that it is a yoke, borne unequally. You marry to keep love, but sometimes that is the surest way to lose it.

Lots of people think they're charitable if they give away their old clothes and things they don't want.

On marriage: Someone once said that it was like a crowded church -- those outside were endeavouring to get in, and those inside were making violent efforts to get out.

Married and unmarried women waste a great deal of time in feeling sorry for each other.