Top 35 Fanny Fern Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

— Fanny Fern

2. “The cream of enjoyment in this life is always impromptu. The chance walk; the unexpected visit; the unpremeditated journey; the unsought conversation or acquaintance.”

— Fanny Fern

3. “To her, the name of father was another name for love.”

— Fanny Fern

4. “Oh! to be a child again. My only treasures, bits of shell and stone and glass. To love nothing but maple sugar. To fear nothing but a big dog. To go to sleep without dreading the morrow. To wake up with a shout. Not to have seen a dead face. Not to dread a living one. To be able to believe.”

— Fanny Fern

5. “Hotel life is about the same in every latitude.”

— Fanny Fern

6. “What a pity when editors review a woman’s book, that they so often fall into the error of reviewing the woman instead.”

— Fanny Fern

7. “I am getting sick of people. I am falling in love with things. They hold their tongues...”

— Fanny Fern

8. “Dear reader, true religion is not gloomy.”

— Fanny Fern

9. “It is the most astonishing thing that persons who have not sufficient education to spell correctly, to punctuate properly, to place capital letters in the right places, should, when other means of support fail, send mss. for publication.”

— Fanny Fern

10. “Show me an ‘easy person,’ and I will show you a selfish one. Good-natured he may be; why not? since the disastrous consequences of his ‘easiness’ are generally shouldered by other people.”

— Fanny Fern

11. “When a literary person’s exhaustive work is over, the last thing he wishes to do is to talk books.”

— Fanny Fern

12. “Fitz Allen had ‘traveled;’ and that is generally understood to mean to go abroad and remain a period of time long enough to grow a fierce beard, and fierce mustache, and cultivate a thorough contempt for everything in your own country.”

— Fanny Fern

13. “Nowhere more than in New York does the contest between squalor and splendor so sharply present itself.”

— Fanny Fern

14. “O, girls! set your affections on cats, poodles, parrots or lap-dogs; but let matrimony alone. It’s the hardest way on earth to getting a living.”

— Fanny Fern

15. “Never ask a favor until you are drawing your last breath; and never forget one.”

— Fanny Fern

16. “There are no little things. Little things are the hinges of the universe.”

— Fanny Fern

17. “I hate the word proper. If you tell me a thing is not proper, I immediately feel the most rabid desire to go ‘neck and heels’ into it.”

— Fanny Fern

18. “Uncles and aunts, and cousins, are all very well, and fathers and mothers are not to be despised; but a grandmother, at holiday time, is worth them all.”

— Fanny Fern

19. “Love is a farce; matrimony is a humbug; husbands are domestic Napoleons, Neroes, Alexanders, – sighing for other hearts to conquer, after they are sure of yours.”

— Fanny Fern

20. “Well, it is a humiliating reflection, that the straightest road to a man’s heart is through his palate.”

— Fanny Fern

21. “Never compel yourself to say words to which the heart yields no response.”

— Fanny Fern

22. “Hoary-headed old Winter, I have had enough of you!”

— Fanny Fern

23. “She said it was beautiful to be loved, and that it made everything on earth look brighter.”

— Fanny Fern

Featured in: Romance Quotes

24. “Experience is an excellent doctor, though he never had a diploma.”

— Fanny Fern

25. “To the Pilgrim Mothers, who not only had their full share of the hardships and privations of pioneer life but also had the Pilgrim Fathers to endure.”

— Fanny Fern

26. “Too much indulgence has ruined thousands of children; too much love not one.”

— Fanny Fern

27. “I am convinced that there are times in everybody’s experience when there is so much to be done, that the only way to do it is to sit down and do nothing.”

— Fanny Fern

28. “Blessed be sleep! We are all young then; we are all happy. Then our dead are living.”

— Fanny Fern

29. “One person is as good as another in New England, and better, too.”

— Fanny Fern

30. “The term ‘lady’ has been so misused, that I like better the old-fashioned term, woman.”

— Fanny Fern

31. “How strong sometimes is weakness!”

— Fanny Fern

32. “Pity that gold should always bring with it the canker – covetousness.”

— Fanny Fern

33. “I dare say you will try to make me believe that Editors are human. Now I deny that, for I myself have, in past days, had evidence to the contrary.”

— Fanny Fern

34. “No crust so tough as the grudged bread of dependence.”

— Fanny Fern

35. “Advice is like a doctor’s pills; how easily he gives them! how reluctantly he takes them when his turn comes!”

— Fanny Fern

36. “Our domestic Napoleons, too many of them, give flattery, bonnets and bracelets to women, and everything else but – justice...”

— Fanny Fern

37. “Everything in the country, animate and inanimate, seems to whisper, be serene, be kind, be happy. We grow tolerant there unconsciously.”

— Fanny Fern

38. “Why will parents use that expression? What right have you to have a favorite child?”

— Fanny Fern