No passion is stronger in the breast of a man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high.

For pleasure has no relish unless we share it.

Love and religion! thought Clarissa, going back into the drawing room, tingling all over. How detestable, how detestable they are!

Yield to that strange passion which sends you madly whirling round the room.

We are nauseated by the sight of trivial personalities decomposing in the eternity of print.

It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.

At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever