Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.

It is in the faculty of noble, disinterested, unselfish love that lies the true gift and power of womanhood,--a power which makes us, not the equal of men (I never care to claim such equality), but their equivalents more than their equivalents in a moral sense.

I could discern clearly, even at that early age, the essential difference between people who are kind to dogs and people who really love them.

Pleasures of the mind have this advantage,--they never cloy nor wear themselves out, but increase by employment.

The nest may be constructed, so far as the sticks go, by the male bird but only the hen can line it with moss and down!

He who does most to cure woman of her weakness, her frivolity, and her servility will likewise at the same stroke do most to cure man of his brutality, his selfishness and his sensuality.

If a woman be herself pure and noble-hearted, she will come into every circle as a person does into a heated room, who carries with him the freshness of the woods where he has been walking.

Men give us most rarely that which we really want, not favor, but - Justice. Nothing is easier than to coax them to pet us like children, nothing more difficult than to persuade them to treat us like responsible human beings.

I think it is worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and manage by base arts a husband or a father,--I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.

Science is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.

The time comes to every dog when it ceases to care for people merely for biscuits or bones, or even for caresses, and walks out of doors. When a dog really loves, it prefers the person who gives it nothing, and perhaps is too ill ever to take it out for exercise, to all the liberal cooks and active dog-boys in the world.

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!

It is a woman, and only a woman, — a woman all by herself, if she likes, and without any man to help her, — who can turn a house into a home.