Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness.

There is no action so slight or so mean but it may be done to a great purpose, and ennobled thereby.

Do not think it wasted time to submit yourselves to any influence which may bring upon you any noble feeling.

What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do

Failure is less attributable to either insufficiency of means or impatience of labours than to a confused understanding of the thing actually to be done.

Flowers seem intended for the solace of ordinary humanity.

How false is the conception, how frantic the pursuit, of that treacherous phantom which men call Liberty: most treacherous, indeed, of all phantoms; for the feeblest ray of reason might surely show us, that not only its attainment, but its being, was impossible..... There is no such thing in the universe. There can never be. The stars have it not; the earth has it not; the sea has it not; and we men have the mockery and semblance of it only for our heaviest punishment.