Samuel Richardson Quotes

But a caution, Harriet! — Never, never, let foolish dreams claim a moment of your attention — Imminent as seemed the danger, your superstition made more dreadful to you than otherwise it would have been. You have a mind superior to such foibles: Act up to its native dignity, and let not the follies of your nurses, in your infantile state, be carried into your maturer age, to depreciate your womanly reason. Do you think I don’t dream, as well as you?

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?

Travelling! Young men travelling! I cannot, my dear, but think it a very nonsensical thing! What can they see, but the ruins of the gay, once busy world, of which they have read? To see a parcel of giddy boys, under the direction of tutors, or governors, hunting after — What? — Nothing; or at best but ruins of ruins; for the imagination, aided by reflection, must be lest, after all, to make out the greater glories which the grave-digger Time has buried too deep for discovery.

And is it a crime to acknowlege, that they are so well disposed to a worthy object? A worthy object, I repeat; for that is what will warrant the open heart. What a littleness is there in the custom that compels us to be insincere? And suppose we do not succeed with a first object, shall we cheat a future Lover with the notion that he was the first?

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.

do not easily dislike, Sir; but then I do not easily like. And I never will marry any man, to whom I cannot be more than indifferent.

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

I have lived to a great age: Yet to look backward to the time of my youth, when I was not a stranger to the hopes and fears that now agitate you, what a short space does it seem to be!

Tired of myself longing for what I have not

For love must be a very foolish thing to look back upon, when it has brought persons born to affluence into indigence, and laid a generous mind under obligation and dependence.

Il mondo forma i suoi giudizi sulle nostre azioni piuttosto dai fatti che da dove stia la ragione nei casi dubbi.

Is not friendship the basis of my Love?

My Master said, on another Occasion, that those who doubt most, always erred least.

That she thought me the prettiest creature she ever beheld. — Creature was her word — We are all creatures, ’tis true: But I think I never was more displeased with the sound of the word Creature, than I was from Lady Anne.

Women must not encourage Fops and Fools. They must encourage Men of Sense only. And it is well said. But what will they do, if their lot be cast only among Foplings? If the Men of Sense do not offer themselves? And pray, may I not ask, if the taste of the age, among the men, is not Dress, Equipage, and Foppery? Is the cultivation of the mind any part of their study? The men, in short, are sunk, my dear; and the women but barely swim.