Samuel Richardson Quotes

You say that if a woman resolves not to marry till she finds herself addressed to by a man of strict virtue, she must be for ever single. If this be true, what wicked creatures are men! What a dreadful abuse of passions, given them for the noblest purposes, are they guilty of!

Well, my story, surely, would furnish out a surprising kind of novel, if it were to be well told.

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.

A husband's mother and his wife had generally better be visitors than inmates

See a fond mother incircled by her children: With pious tenderness she looks around, and her soul even melts with maternal Love. One she kisses on the forehead; and clasps another to her bosom. One she sets upon her knees; and finds a seat upon her foot for another. And while, by their actions, their lisping words, and asking eyes, she understands their various numberless little wishes, to these she dispenses a look; a word to those; and whether she smiles or frowns, ’tis all in tender Love.

A feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it, would be without; and it is a moral security of innocence; since the heart that is able to partake of the distress of another, cannot wilfully give it.

Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honour, false glory, and false religion?

I am not to know the contents of his Letter. The hearts of us women, when we are urged to give way to a clandestine and unequal address, or when inclined to favour such a one, are apt, and are pleaded with, to rise against the notions of bargain and sale. Smithfield bargains, you Londoners call them:

Lady Olivia enquired after the distance of North hamptonshire. She will make the tour of England, she says, and visit me there. I was obliged to say I should take her visit as an honour. Wicked Politeness! Of how many falshoods dost thou make the people, who are called polite, guilty!

What the deuse do we men go to school for? If our wits were equal to women's, we might spare much time and pains in our education: for nature teaches your sex, what, in a long course of labour and study, ours can hardly attain to.

If she be a woman, and love me, I shall surely catch her once tripping: for love was ever a traitor to its harbourer: and Love within, and I without, she will be more than a woman, as the poet says, or I less than man, if I succeed not.

And what after all, is death?? 'Tis but a cessation from mortal life; 'tis but the finishing of an appointed course; the refreshing inn after a fatiguing journey; the end of a life of cares and troubles; and, if happy, the beginning of a life of immortal happiness.

I will bear any thing you can inflict upon me with Patience, even to the laying down of my Life, to shew my Obedience to you in other Cases; but I cannot be patient, I cannot be passive, when my Virtue is at Stake!

There hardly can be a greater difference between any two men, than there too often is, between the same man, a lover and a husband.

He pulled the other hand from her eye. The handkerchief dropt: He might see that it was wet and heavy with her tears. Fain would she have turn’d her blubber’d eye from him. He held both her hands, and burst out into a laugh