I think I love most people best when they are in adversity; for pity is one of my prevailing passions.

Modesty is the graceful, calm virtue of maturity; bashfulness the charm of vivacious youth.

Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but, as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavor to keep women in the dark because, the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing.

But what a weak barrier is truth when it stands in the way of an hypothesis!

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world.

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.

Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.