The affections are immortal! They are the sympathies which unite the ceaseless generations.

Nothing but real love--(how rare it is; has one human heart in a million ever known it?) nothing but real love can repay us for the loss of freedom--the cares and fears of poverty--the cold pity of the world that we both despise and respect.

Could we know by what strange circumstances a man's genius became prepared for practical success, we should discover that the most serviceable items in his education were never entered in the bills which his father paid for.

Vanity, indeed, is the very antidote to conceit; for while the former makes us all nerve to the opinion of others, the latter is perfectly satisfied with its opinion of itself.

A fiction which is designed to inculcate an object wholly alien to the imagination sins against the first law of art; and if a writer of fiction narrow his scope to particulars so positive as polemical controversy in matters ecclesiastical, political or moral, his work may or may not be an able treatise, but it must be a very poor novel.

Honest men are the gentlemen of nature.

Youth is in danger until it learns to look upon debts as furies.