The last excessive feelings of delight are always grave.
The loveliest hair is nothing, if the wearer is incapable of a grace.
The perfection of conversational intercourse is when the breeding of high life is animated by the fervor of genius.
The most fascinating women are those that can most enrich the every day moments of existence. In a particular and attaching sense, they are those that can partake our pleasures and our pains in the liveliest and most devoted manner. Beauty is little without this; with it she is triumphant.
The more sensible a woman is, supposing her not to be masculine, the more attractive she is in her proportionate power to entertain.
Tears and sorrows and losses are a part of what must be experienced in this present state of life: some for our manifest good, and ail, therefore, it is trusted, for our good concealed; – for our final and greatest good.
Danger for danger’s sake is senseless.
When moral courage feels that it is in the right, there is no personal daring of which it is incapable.
Anglers boast of the innocence of their pastime; yet it puts fellow-creatures to the torture. They pique themselves on their meditative faculties; and yet their only excuse is a want of thought.
A large bare forehead gives a woman a masculine and defying look. The word “effrontery” comes from it. The hair should be brought over such a forehead as vines are trailed over a wall.
Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all visible things.
Little eyes must be good-tempered or they are ruined. They have no other resource. But this will beautify them enough. They are made for laughing, and, should do their duty.
Mankind are creatures of books, as well as of other circumstances; and such they eternally remain, – proofs, that the race is a noble and believing race, and capable of whatever books can stimulate.
I am persuaded there is no such thing after all as a perfect enjoyment of solitude; for the more delicious the solitude the more one wants a companion.
An author is like a baker; it is for him to make the sweets, and others to buy and enjoy them.
God made both tears and laughter, and both for kind purposes; for as laughter enables mirth and surprise to breathe freely, so tears enable sorrow to vent itself patiently. Tears hinder sorrow from becoming despair and madness.
Did you ever observe that immoderate laughter always ends in a sigh?
Improvement is nature.
May exalting and humanizing thoughts forever accompany me, making me confident without pride, and modest without servility.
There seems a life in hair, though it be dead.