How is it that hope so powerfully excites, and fear so absolutely depresses all our faculties?

If young women were not deceived into a belief that affectation pleases, they would scarcely trouble themselves to practise it so much.

Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.

Love occupies a vast space in a woman's thoughts, but fills a small portion in a man's life.

There are two sorts of content; one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence. The first is a virtue; the other, a vice.

Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape.

The labor of thinking was so great to me, that having once come to a conclusion upon any subject, I would rather persist in it, right or wrong, than be at the trouble of going over the process again to revise and rectify my judgment.