There will always be romance in the world so long as there are young hearts in it.

Most books fail, not so much from a want of ability in their authors, as from an absence in their productions of a thorough development of their ability.

A genuine passion is like a mountain stream; it admits of no impediment; it cannot go backward; it must go forward.

Truth, like the sun, submits to be obscured; but, like the sun, only for a time.

As threshing separates the wheat from the chaff, so does affliction purify virtue.

Wit must be without effort. Wit is play, not work; a nimbleness of the fancy, not a laborious effort of the will; a license, a holiday, a carnival of thought and feeling, not a trifling with speech, a constraint upon language, a duress upon words.

The opinions of the misanthropical rest upon this very partial basis, that they adopt the bad faith of a few as evidence of the worthlessness of all.