Parents sometimes make not those allowances for youth, which, when young, they wished to be made for themselves.
Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honor, false glory, and false religion?
It is better to be thought perverse than insincere.
Nothing dries sooner than tears.
That dangerous but too commonly received notion, that a reformed rake makes the best husband.
A feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it, would be without; and it is a moral security of innocence; since the heart that is able to partake of the distress of another, cannot wilfully give it.
Hope is the cordial that keeps life from stagnating.
A widow’s refusal of a lover is seldom so explicit as to exclude hope.
To be a clergyman, and all that is compassionate and virtuous, ought to be the same thing.
We are all very ready to believe what we like.
The World, thinking itself affronted by superior merit, takes delight to bring it down to its own level.
The plays and sports of children are as salutary to them as labor and work are to grown persons.
She who is more ashamed of dishonesty than of poverty will not be easily overcome.
What pleasure can those over-happy persons know, who, from their affluence and luxury, always eat before they are hungry and drink before they are thirsty?
Old men, imagining themselves under obligation to young paramours, seldom keep any thing from their knowledge.
Reverence to a woman in courtship is less to be dispensed with, as, generally, there is but little of it shown afterwards.
The coyest maids make the fondest wives.
Those who doubt themselves most generally err least.
The unhappy never want enemies.
Those commands of superiors which are contrary to our first duties are not to be obeyed.