Samuel Richardson Quotes

Why should such an angel be plunged so low as into the vulgar offices of domestic life? Were she mine, I should hardly wish to see her a mother unless there were a kind of moral certainty that minds like hers could be propagated.

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.

You are all too rich to be happy, child. For must not each of you be the constitutions of your family marry to be still richer? People who know in what their main excellence consists are not to be blamed (are they?) for cultivating and improving what they think most valuable? Is true happiness any part of your family-view? — So far from it, that none of your family but yourself could be happy were they not rich. So let them fret on, grumble and grudge, and accumulate; and wondering what ails them that they have not happiness when they have riches, think the cause is want of more; and so go on heaping up till Death, as greedy an accumulator as themselves, gathers them into his garner!

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!

I am not apt to run into grave declamations against the times:

What poor wretches are we, Harriet, men as well as women! We pray for long life; and what is the issue of our prayers, but leave to outlive our teeth and our friends, to stand in the way of our elbowing relations, and to change our swan-skins for skins of buff; which nevertheless will keep out neither cold nor infirmity?

And pray, said I, walking on, how came I to be his Property? What Right has he in me, but such as a Thief may plead to stolen Goods?

It is unworthy of a man of spirit to be sollicitous to keep himself within the boundaries of human laws, on no other motive than to avoid the temporal inconveniencies attending the breach of them. The laws were not made so much for the direction of good men, as to circumscribe the bad.

It was most gracefully done: But see, Lucy, the example of a good and generous man can sometimes alter natures; and covetous men, I have heard it observed, when their hearts are open’d, often act nobly.

Even now that I have concluded this moving recapitulation, it seems as nothing; and the whole world, my dear is as a bit of dirt under my feet.

They will very probably, by remembring past mistakes, avoid many inconveniencies into which forgetfulness will run you lively ones.

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?

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.

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:

Handsome husbands often make a wife's heart ache.