It is difficult to be emphatic when no one is emphatic on the other side.
There is no beauty like that which was spoiled by an accident; no accomplishments and graces are so to be envied as those that circumstances rudely hindered the development of.
Plots are no more exhausted than men are. Every man is a new creation, and combinations are simply endless.
A woman set on anything will walk right through the moral crockery without wincing.
Let us celebrate the soil. Most men toil that they may own a piece of it; they measure their success in life by their ability to buy it.
There is life in the ground; it goes into the seeds and also when it is stirred up goes into the man who stirs it.
To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch the renewal of life - this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do.
There is nothing that disgusts a man like getting beaten at chess by a woman.
The man who has planted a garden feels that he has done something for the good of the world.
Woman is perpetual revolution, and is that element in the world which continually destroys and recreates.
Women are not as sentimental as men, and are not so easily touched with the unspoken poetry of nature, being less poetical, and having less imagination; they are more fitted for practical affairs, and would make fewer failures in business.
The wise man does not permit himself to set up even in his own mind any comparisons of his friends. His friendship is capable of going to extremes with many people, evoked as it is by many qualities.
I know that unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but I don't know what success is.
How many wars have been caused by fits of indigestion, and how many more dynasties have been upset by the love of woman than by the hate of man?
What a man needs in gardening is a cast-iron back, with a hinge in it.
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.