Jane Welsh Carlyle

I declare I would rather be a kitten and cry, 'Mew!' than live as I see many of my female acquaintances do, tearing each other's characters to pieces, and wearing out their lives in vanity and vexation of spirit.

They call me 'sweet,' and 'gentle'; and some of the men go the length of calling me 'endearing,' and I laugh in my sleeve and think, 'Oh, Lord! If you but knew what a brimstone of a creature I am behind all this beautiful amiability!'

I wonder that among all the evils deprecated in the Liturgy, no one thought of inserting flitting. Is there any worse thing? Oh no, no!

Who knows but I shall grow reasonable at last, descend from my ideal heaven to the real earth, marry, and - Oh Plato! - make a pudding?

I have lived so long among people who do not understand me, been so long accustomed to refrain and disguise myself for fear of being laughed at, that I have grown as difficult to come at as a snail in a shell; and what is worse, I cannot come out of my shell when I wish it.

I rely on the promise, 'God is kind to women, fools, and drunk people.'

I do think there is much truth in the Young German idea that marriage is a shockingly immoral institution, as well as what we have long known it for - an extremely disagreeable one.

But what are friends? What is a husband, even, compared with one's Mother? Of her love, one is always so sure! It is the only love that nothing - not even misconduct on our part - can take away from us.

The surest way to get a thing in this life is to be prepared for doing without it, to the exclusion even of hope.

On earth the living have much to bear;' the difference is chiefly in the manner of bearing, and my manner of bearing is far from being the best.

There is nothing like a good bit of pain for taking the conceit out of one.

Homeopathy - an invention of the Father of Lies! I have tried it and found it wanting. I would swallow their whole doles' medicine chest for sixpence, and be sure of finding myself neither better nor worse for it.