“Have regular hours for work and play; make each day both useful and pleasant, and prove that you understand the worth of time by employing it well. Then youth will be delightful, old age will bring few regrets, and life will become a beautiful success.”

Don’t shut yourself up in a band box because you are a woman, but understand what is going on, and educate yourself to take part in the world’s work, for it all affects you and yours.

Love is a great beautifier.

Wild roses are fairest, and nature a better gardener than art.

There is very little real liberty in the world; even those who seem freest are often the most tightly bound. Law, custom, public opinion, fear or shame make slaves of us all, as you will find when you try your experiment.

Some books are so familiar that reading them is like being home again.

Marriage, they say, halves one’s rights and doubles one’s duties.

My book came out; and people began to think that topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all.

Nothing is impossible to a determined woman.

It takes so little to make a child happy, that it is a pity in a world full of sunshine and pleasant things, that there should be any wistful faces, empty hands, or lonely little hearts.

Be comforted, dear soul! There is always light behind the clouds.

It takes very little fire to make a great deal of smoke nowadays, and notoriety is not real glory.

Don’t try to make me grow up before my time.

Father asked us what was God’s noblest work. Anna said men, but I said babies. Men are often bad, but babies never are.

Happy is the son whose faith in his mother remains unchallenged.

I’ve got the key to my castle in the air, but whether I can unlock the door remains to be seen.

Every house needs a grandmother in it.

I was five years old the first time I got drunk.

What Youth deemed crystal, Age finds out was dew.

Everyone desires long life, not one old age.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

Already for thirty-five years he had not stopped talking and almost nothing of fundamental value had emerged.

Female beauties are as fickle in their faces as in their minds; though casualties should spare them, age brings in a necessity of decay.

We of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.