The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.

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

It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

... the whole tenour of female education ... tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean.

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.