*
Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man, because
he once paid too dearly for a penny whistle. My concern
springs usually from a deeper source, to wit, from having
bought a whistle when I did not want one.
*
I believe in a better state of things, that there will be
no more nurses, and that every mother will nurse her own
offspring; for what can be more hardening and demoralising
than to call forth the tenderest feelings of a woman's
heart and cherish them yourself as long as you need them,
as long as your children require a nurse to love them, and
then to blight and thwart and destroy them, whenever your
own use for them is at an end.
*
We had needs invent heaven if it had not been revealed
to us; there are some things that fall so bitterly ill on
this side time!
*
To write with authority about another man, we must have
fellow-feeling and some common ground of experience with
our subject. We may praise or blame according as we find
him related to us by the best or worst in ourselves; but it
is only in virtue of some relationship that we can be his
judges, even to condemn. Feelings which we share and
understand enter for us into the tissue of the man's
character; those to which we are strangers in our own
experience we are inclined to regard as blots, exceptions,
inconsistencies, and excursions of the diabolic; we
conceive them with repugnance, explain them with
difficulty, and raise our hands to heaven in wonder when we
find them in conjunction with talents that we respect or
virtues that we admire.
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