Taste is the power of relishing or rejecting whatever is offered for the entertainment of the imagination.

She who makes her husband and her children happy, who reclaims the one from vice, and trains up the other to virtue, is a much greater character than the ladies described in romance, whose whole occupation is to murder mankind with shafts from their quiver or their eyes.

I have known a German Prince with more titles than subjects, and a Spanish nobleman with more names than shirts.

Could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet.

A French woman is a perfect architect in dress: she never, with Gothic ignorance, mixes the orders; she never tricks out a snobby Doric shape with Corinthian finery; or, to speak without metaphor, she conforms to general fashion only when it happens not to be repugnant to private beauty.

You, that are going to be married, think things can never be done too fast: but we that are old, and know what we are about, must elope methodically, madam.

[T]here are depths of thousands of miles which are hidden from our inquiry. The only tidings we have from those unfathomable regions are by means of volcanoes, those burning mountains that seem to discharge their materials from the lowest abysses of the earth.