Samuel Richardson
Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.Collection: Time
Love will draw an elephant through a key-hole.Collection: Love
Quantity in diet is more to be regarded than quality. A full meal is a great enemy both to study and industry.Collection: Diet
Married people should not be quick to hear what is said by either when in ill humor.Collection: Humor
The plays and sports of children are as salutary to them as labor and work are to grown persons.Collection: Sports
Let a man do what he will by a single woman, the world is encouragingly apt to think Marriage a sufficient amends.Collection: Marriage
From sixteen to twenty, all women, kept in humor by their hopes and by their attractions, appear to be good-natured.Collection: Humor
A beautiful woman must expect to be more accountable for her steps, than one less attractive.
Smatterers in learning are the most opinionated.
The companion of an evening, and the companion for life, require very different qualifications.
Where words are restrained, the eyes often talk a great deal.
Handsome husbands often make a wife's heart ache.
The little words in the Republic of Letters, like the little folks in a nation, are the most useful and significant.
Calamity is the test of integrity.
We are all very ready to believe what we like.
It is much easier to find fault with others, than to be faultless ourselves.
Honeymoon lasts not nowadays above a fortnight.
Women are always most observed when they seem themselves least to observe, or to lay out for observation.
All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.
Love is not a volunteer thing.
Necessity may well be called the mother of invention but calamity is the test of integrity.
Nothing dries sooner than tears.
It is better to be thought perverse than insincere.
Love gratified is love satisfied, and love satisfied is indifference begun.
The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.
For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse.
The life of a good man is a continual warfare with his passions.
The laws were not made so much for the direction of good men, as to circumscribe the bad.
Women love to be called cruel, even when they are kindest.
Those who can least bear a jest upon themselves, will be most diverted with one passed on others.
Vast is the field of Science. The more a man knows, the more he will find he has to know.
To what a bad choice is many a worthy woman betrayed, by that false and inconsiderate notion, That a reformed rake makes the best husband!
O! what a Godlike Power is that of doing Good! I envy the Rich and the Great for nothing else!
Those who will bear much, shall have much to bear.
Every one, more or less, loves Power, yet those who most wish for it are seldom the fittest to be trusted with it.
A widow's refusal of a lover is seldom so explicit as to exclude hope.
Men generally are afraid of a wife who has more understanding than themselves.
Whenever we approve, we can find a hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike.
Tutors who make youth learned do not always make them virtuous.
There hardly can be a greater difference between any two men, than there too often is, between the same man, a lover and a husband.
To be a clergyman, and all that is compassionate and virtuous, ought to be the same thing.
A man may keep a woman, but not his estate.
Marry first, and love will come after is a shocking assertion; since a thousand things may happen to make the state but barely tolerable, when it is entered into with mutual affection.
Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?
Women do not often fall in love with philosophers.
Shame is a fitter and generally a more effectual punishment for a child than beating.
All human excellence is but comparative. There may be persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest.
Every scholar, I presume, is not, necessarily, a man of sense.
Those we dislike can do nothing to please us.
What likelihood is there of corrupting a man who has no ambition?