Illness was a sort of occupation to me, and I was always sorry to get well.
Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.
Nature’s hasty conscience.
There are two sorts of content; one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence. The first is a virtue; the other, a vice.
Beauty is a great gift of heaven; not for the purpose of female vanity, but a great gift for one who loves, and wishes to be beloved.
According to the Asiatics, Cupid’s bow is strung with bees which are apt to sting, sometimes fatally, those who meddle with it.
Beauties are always curious about beauties, and wits about wits.
Confidence is the best proof of love.
Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality.
Man is to be held only by the slightest chains; with the idea that he can break them at pleasure, he submits to them in sport.
Young ladies who think of nothing but dress, public amusements, and forming what they call high connexions, are undoubtedly most easily managed, by the fear of what the world will say of them.
Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man’s mind, under the general head of liberty.
We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present.
First loves are not necessarily more foolish than others; but the chances are certainly against them. Proximity of time or place, a variety of accidental circumstances more than the essential merits of the object, often produce what is called first love.
Justice satisfies everybody.
Hope can produce the finest and most permanent springs of action.
Besides the bore condescending, who, whether good-natured or ill-natured, is a most provoking animal – there is the bore facetious, an insufferable creature, always laughing, but with whom you can never laugh. And there is another exotic variety – the vive la bagatelle bore of the ape kind – who imitate men of genius. Having early been taught that there is nothing more delightful than the unbending of a great mind, they set about continually to unbend the bow in company.
At ebb time – a time which must come to all, pretty or rich, treasures are discovered upon some shores; or golden sands are seen when the waters run low. In others bare rocks, slime, or reptiles. May I never be at low tide with a bore!
The common female blue is indeed intolerable as a wife – opinionative and opinionated; and her opinion always is that her husband is wrong. John certainly has a rooted aversion to this whole class. There is the deep blue and the light; the light blues not esteemed – not admitted at Almacks. The deep-dyed in the nine times dyed blue – is that with which no man dares contend. The blue chatterer is seen and heard every where; it no man will attempt to silence by throwing the handkerchief.
Women are now so highly cultivated, and political subjects are at present of so much importance, of such high interest, to all human creatures who live together in society, you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it is now, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, “ladies have nothing to do with politics.
Make it a rule, you know, to believe only half the world says.