“Girls are taught to seem, to appear – not to be and do.”

Wherever I am, I see the yoke on women in some form or another. On some it sits easy for they are but beasts of burden.

On some it galls and chafes; they feel assured by every instinct of their nature that they were designed for a higher, nobler calling than to ‘drag life’s lengthening chain along.

[On her recently widowed father’s much younger wife:] My father has been very busy in conjugating the verb to love, and I assure you he declines its moods and tenses inimitably.

Is not sorrow, all sorrow, selfish?

On others pride hushes them to silence; no complaint is made for they scorn pity or sympathy.

Some flowers give out little or no odour until crushed.

Democracy is the healthful lifeblood which circulates through the veins and arteries, which supports the system, but which ought never to appear externally, and as the mere blood itself.

When I reappear it will be in the dusky ring, which is something like the state of the air supposing the siege of Sebastopol conducted from a forest of guns 100 miles one way, and 30,000 miles the other, and the shot never to stop, but go spinning away round a circle, radius 170,000 miles.

Girls have that wonderful thing where they try to throw each other off, not wanting to appear too eager.

This is the epitaph I want on my tomb: Here lies one of the most intelligent animals who ever appeared on the face of the earth.

Science appears to us with a very different aspect after we have found out that it is not in lecture rooms only, and by means of the electric light projected on a screen, that we may witness physical phenomena.

But that we may find illustrations of the highest doctrines of science in games and gymnastics, in travelling by land and by water, in storms of the air and of the sea, and wherever there is matter in motion.

But today, in the world’s most powerful democracy, the politicians and the propagandists prefer to make nonsense of democratic procedures by appealing almost exclusively to the ignorance and irrationality of the electors.

A star appeared…and was momentarily eclipsed by some movement.