The reading or non-reading a book will never keep down a single petticoat.

Wives in their husbands' absences grow subtler, And daughters sometimes run off with the butler.

Women hate everything which strips off the tinsel of sentiment, and they are right, or it would rob them of their weapons.

Yes! ready money is Aladdin's lamp.

The fact is that my wife if she had common sense would have more power over me than any other whatsoever, for my heart always alights upon the nearest perch.

There is no such thing as a life of passion any more than a continuous earthquake, or an eternal fever. Besides, who would ever shave themselves in such a state?

What should I have known or written had I been a quiet, mercantile politician or a lord in waiting? A man must travel, and turmoil, or there is no existence.

A woman who gives any advantage to a man may expect a lover but will sooner or later find a tyrant.

There is pleasure in the pathless woods, there is rapture in the lonely shore, there is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar; I love not Man the less, but Nature more.

If I am fool, it is, at least, a doubting one; and I envy no one the certainty of his self-approved wisdom.

I slept and dreamt that life was beauty; I woke and found that life was duty.

Sincerity may be humble but she cannot be servile.

Cervantes smiled Spain's chivalry away; A single laugh demolished the right arm Of his country.

Shakespeare's name, you may depend on it, stands absurdly too high and will go down.

The best prophet of the future is the past.

But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Opinions are made to be changed or how is truth to be got at?

Self-love for ever creeps out, like a snake, to sting anything which happens to stumble upon it.

Lovers may be and indeed generally are enemies, but they never can be friends, because there must always be a spice of jealousy and a something of Self in all their speculations.

Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life, and if Virtue is not its own reward, I don't know any other stipend annexed to it.