Plot, rules, nor even poetry, are not half so great beauties in tragedy or comedy as a just imitation of nature, of character, of the passions and their operations in diversified situations.
I have known men of valor cowards to their wives.
I look upon paradoxes as the impotent efforts of men who, not having capacity to draw attention and celebrity from good sense, fly to eccentricities to make themselves noted.
Had I children, my utmost endeavors would be to make them musicians.
Posterity always degenerates till it becomes our ancestors.
Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.
A bystander often sees more of the game than those that play.
I fear no bad angel, and have offended no good one.
The farther I travel, the less I wonder at anything: a few days reconcile one to a new spot, or an unseen custom; and men are so much the same everywhere, that one scare perceives a change in situation.
Heaven mocks the short-sighted views of man.
I hold visions to be wisdom, and would deny them only to ambition, which exists only by the destruction of visions of everybody else.
This life is but a pilgrimage.
This is a bad world; nor have I had cause to leave it with regret.
The most remarkable thing I have observed since I came abroad, is, that there are no people so obviously mad as the English.
My veracity is dearer to me than my life,” said the peasant; “nor would I purchase the one by forfeiting the other.
There is nothing I hold so cheap as a learned man, except an unlearned one .
My soul abhors a falsehood.
It is sinful to cherish those whom heaven has doomed to destruction.
Nor have I forgotten sir. that the charity of his daughter delivered me from his power. I can forget injuries but never benefits.
He sighed, and retired, but with eyes fixed on the gate, until Matilda, closing it, put an end to an interview, in which the hearts of both had drunk so deeply of a passion, which both now tasted for the first time.
The hearts of both had drunk so deeply of a passion which both now tasted for the first time.