Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!

Perhaps nobody ever accomplishes all that he feels lies in him to do; but nearly every one who tries his powers touches the walls of his being occasionally, and learns about how far to attempt to spring.

There isn't a wife in the world who has not taken the exact measure of her husband, weighed him and settled him in her own mind, and knows him as well as if she had ordered him after designs and specifications of her own.

Memory has the singular characteristic of recalling in a friend absent, as in a journey long past, only that which is agreeable.

There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.

Nature is, in fact, a suggester of uneasiness, a promoter of pilgrimages and of excursions of the fancy which never come to any satisfactory haven.

Nature is entirely indifferent to any reform. She perpetuates a fault as persistently as a virtue.

The chief effect of talk on any subject is to strengthen one's own opinions, and, in fact, one never knows exactly what he does believe until he is warmed into conviction by the heat of attack and defence.

The most popular persons in society are those who take the world as it is, find the least fault, and have [ride] no hobbies.

Broad acres are a patent of nobility; and no man but feels more of a man in the world if he have a bit of ground that he can call his own. However small it is on the surface, it is four thousand miles deep; and that is a very handsome property.