Samuel Richardson Quotes

But I have no patience with you, sinner as you are against light, and better knowlege! and derider of the infirmities, not of old maids, but of old age! — Don’t you hope to live long, yourself?

See, madam, my Lord is sullen; he won’t answer me. I must get you to ask my questions. I think it my duty to ask leave to go. My Lord may go where he pleases, without my leave — Very fit he should. He is a man. I once could have done so; high-ho! but I have vowed obedience and vassalage. I will not break my vow. Ask him, If I have his consent for a visit to Miss Byron, of a month or two? Ask him, madam, If he can make himself happy in my absence? I should otherwise be loth to go for so long a time.

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.

Ma è certo, questo ve lo devo confessare, che non potrò mai pensare a nessun altro al mondo se non a lui! Presunzione! direte voi; e questo è. Ma l'amore, immagino, non è una cosa volontaria -l'amore, ho detto! Ma andiamo, io non spero: perlomeno non è, spero, andato così lontano da mettermi molto a disagio: poiché io non so come è venuto, né quando è iniziato, ma mi si è insinuato addosso strisciando, strisciando, come un ladro, e prima che sapessi di che si trattava, aveva l'aspetto dell'amore.

Her three brothers preferred her interests to their own. Her father used to call her, The pride of his life; her mother, Her other self; her own Clementina. [CLEMENTINA! — Ah! Lucy, what a pretty name is Clementina!]

A beautiful woman must expect to be more accountable for her steps, than one less attractive.

There is a kind of magnetism in goodness. Bad people will indeed find out bad people, and confederate with them, in order to keep one another in countenance; but they are bound together by a rope of sand; while trust, confidence, love, sympathy, and a reciprocation of beneficent actions, twist a cord which ties good men to good men, and cannot be easily broken.

Vast is the field of Science … the more a man knows, the more he will find he has to know.

No-body, it seems, thinks of an husband for Miss Barnevelt. She is sneeringly spoken of rather as a young fellow, than as a woman; and who will one day look out for a wife for herself. One reason indeed, she every-where gives, for being satisfied with being a woman; which is, that she cannot be married to a WOMAN.

God direct you according to them, and comfort you! All my fear was (and that more particularly for some of the last past months) that I should have been the mournful survivor. In a very few moments all my sufferings will be over; and God give you, when you come to this unavoidable period of all human vanity, the same happy prospects that are now opening to me! O Sir, believe me, all worldly joys are now nothing; less than nothing:

Love is not a volunteer thing.

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

Indeed, my Marforio, there are very few topics that arise in conversation among men, upon which women ought to open their lips. Silence becomes them. Let them therefore hear, wonder, and improve, in silence. They are naturally contentious, and lovers of contradiction’ [Something like this Mr. Walden once threw out: And you know who, my Lucy, has said as much] ‘and shall we qualify them to be disputants against ourselves?

The person who will bear much shall have much to bear, all the world through.

People of little understanding are most apt to be angry when their sense is called into question.