I fancied I had some constancy of mind because I could bear my own sufferings, but found through the sufferings of others I could be weakened like a child.

I was condemned to be beheaded, or burnt, as the king pleased; and he was graciously pleased, from the great remains of his love, to choose the mildest sentence.

Flattery in courtship is the highest insolence, for whilst it pretends to bestow on you more than you deserve, it is watching an opportunity to take from you what you really have.

I believe no gentleman would like to have his family affairs neglected because his wife was filling her head with crotchets and pothooks, and who, because she understood a few scraps of Latin, valued that more than minding her needle or providing her husband's dinner.

[F]or as Socrates says that a wise man is a citizen of the world, so I thought that a wise woman was equally at liberty to range through every station or degree of men, to fix her choice wherever she pleased.

The motives to actions and the inward turns of mind seem in our opinion more necessary to be known than the actions themselves; and much rather would we choose that our reader should clearly understand what our principal actors think than what they do.

Their virtues lived in their children. The family changed its persons but not its manners, and they continued a blessing to the world from generation to generation.