We cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us.

Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.

The flexible muscles growing daily more rigid give character to the countenance ; that is, they trace the operations of the mind with the iron pen of fate, and tell us not only what powers are within, but how they have been employed.