Nothing dries sooner than tears.
— Samuel Richardson
Nothing in human nature is so God-like as the disposition to do good to our fellow-creatures.
People who act like angels ought to have angels to deal with.
The companion of an evening, and the companion for life, require very different qualifications.
What likelihood is there of corrupting a man who has no ambition?
The life of a good man is a continual warfare with his passions.
O! what a Godlike Power is that of doing Good! I envy the Rich and the Great for nothing else!
Shame is a fitter and generally a more effectual punishment for a child than beating.
Would Alexander, madman as he was, have been so much a madman, had it not been for Homer?
To be a clergyman, and all that is compassionate and virtuous, ought to be the same thing.
For the human mind is seldom at stay: If you do not grow better, you will most undoubtedly grow worse.
What we want to tell, we wish our friend to have curiosity to hear.
A widow's refusal of a lover is seldom so explicit as to exclude hope.
Necessity may well be called the mother of invention but calamity is the test of integrity.
A husband's mother and his wife had generally better be visitors than inmates.
Those who can least bear a jest upon themselves, will be most diverted with one passed on others.
Every scholar, I presume, is not, necessarily, a man of sense.
Married people should not be quick to hear what is said by either when in ill humor.
Women love to be called cruel, even when they are kindest.
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.
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.
Calamity is the test of integrity.
Parents sometimes make not those allowances for youth, which, when young, they wished to be made for themselves.
Love is not a volunteer thing.
The laws were not made so much for the direction of good men, as to circumscribe the bad.
Men will bear many things from a kept mistress, which they would not bear from a wife.
Those we dislike can do nothing to please us.
All human excellence is but comparative. There may be persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest.
Vast is the field of Science. The more a man knows, the more he will find he has to know.
Women do not often fall in love with philosophers.
A man may keep a woman, but not his estate.
It is better to be thought perverse than insincere.
