I am forced, as I have often said, to try to make myself laugh, that I may not cry: for one or other I must do.

The World, thinking itself affronted by superior merit, takes delight to bring it down to its own level.

Be sure don't let people's telling you, you are pretty, puff you up; for you did not make yourself, and so can have no praise due to you for it. It is virtue and goodness only, that make the true beauty.

Nothing in human nature is so God-like as the disposition to do good to our fellow-creatures.

Tired of myself longing for what I have not

From sixteen to twenty, all women, kept in humor by their hopes and by their attractions, appear to be good-natured.

Love is a blazing, crackling, green-wood flame, as much smoke as flame; friendship, married friendship particularly, is a steady,intense, comfortable fire. Love, in courtship, is friendship in hope; in matrimony, friendship upon proof.