You shall not, for the sake of one individual, change the meaning of principle and integrity, nor endeavour to persuade yourself or me, that selfishness is prudence, and insensibility of danger, security for happiness.
Without music, life would be a blank to me.
There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.
Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.
Your retrospections must be so totally void of reproach, that the contentment arising from them, is not of philosophy, but what is much better, of ignorance.
You must be the best judge of your own happiness.
Why not seize the pleasure at once? — How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
When pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.
What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.
What are men to rocks and mountains?
There are secrets in all families.
There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it.
