I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.
Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his country.
Her great merit is finding out mine; there is nothing so amiable as discernment.
Lovers may be and indeed generally are enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.
Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life, and if Virtue is not its own reward, I don’t know any other stipend annexed to it.
I shall soon be six-and-twenty. Is there anything in the future that can possibly console us for not being always twenty-five?
I would rather have a nod from an American, than a snuff- box from an emperor.
It is useless to tell one not to reason but to believe; you might as well tell a man not to wake but sleep.
Men think highly of those who rise rapidly in the world; whereas nothing rises quicker than dust, straw, and feathers.
As long as I retain my feeling and my passion for Nature, I can partly soften or subdue my other passions and resist or endure those of others.
Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.
I am about to be married, and am of course in all the misery of a man in pursuit of happiness.
For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.
Men love in haste, but they detest at leisure.
I do detest everything which is not perfectly mutual.
Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people.
Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.
If we must have a tyrant, let him at least be a gentleman who has been bred to the business, and let us fall by the axe and not by the butcher’s cleaver.
I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.
Tis strange,-but true; for truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction: if it could be told, How much would novels gain by the exchange! How differently the world would men behold!