“I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”

“What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.''He means to draw it out again, I suppose.”

“... she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.”

“It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.”

“I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.”

“It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be worshiping this husband: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the husband in question. Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.”

“The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it oftensubsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”