What is motherhood save Nature in her most gladsome mood?
To follow the impulse of love and feeling is the secret law of every woman’s heart.
The passion of love is essentially selfish, while motherhood widens the circle of our feelings.
The man as he converses is the lover; silent, he is the husband.
The King stands for us all. To die for the King is to die for oneself, for one’s family, which, like the kingdom, cannot die.
The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.
The fact is that love is of two kinds — one which commands, and one which obeys. The two are quite distinct, and the passion to which the one gives rise is not the passion of the other.
The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
Society bristles with enigmas which look hard to solve. It is a perfect maze of intrigue.
Marriage is a matter concerning the whole of life, whilst love aims only at pleasure. On the other hand, marriage will remain when pleasures have vanished, and it is the source of interests far more precious than those of the man and woman entering on the alliance.
Love, dear, is in my eyes the first principle of all the virtues, conformed to the divine likeness. Like all other first principles, it is not a matter of arithmetic; it is the Infinite in us.
Love, as I conceive it, is a purely subjective poem. In all that books tell us about it, there is nothing which is not at once false and true.