Samuel Richardson

“Parents sometimes make not those allowances for youth, which, when young, they wished to be made for themselves.”

“Great allowances ought to be made for the petulance of persons laboring under ill-health.”

“Let a man do what he will by a single woman, the world is encouragingly apt to think Marriage a sufficient amends.”

“Whenever we approve, we can find a hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike.”

“Marry first, and love will come after is a shocking assertion; since a thousand things may happen to make the state but barely tolerable, when it is entered into with mutual affection.”

“From sixteen to twenty, all women, kept in humor by their hopes and by their attractions, appear to be good-natured.”

“Calamity is the test of integrity.”

“Necessity may well be called the mother of invention but calamity is the test of integrity.”

“To be a clergyman, and all that is compassionate and virtuous, ought to be the same thing.”

“All human excellence is but comparative. There may be persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest.”

“Hope is the cordial that keeps life from stagnating.”

“A good man, though he will value his own countrymen, yet will think as highly of the worthy men of every nation under the sun.”

“The first reading of a Will, where a person dies worth anything considerable, generally affords a true test of the relations' love to the deceased.”

“There is but one pride pardonable; that of being above doing a base or dishonorable action.”

“Those who can least bear a jest upon themselves, will be most diverted with one passed on others.”

“Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.”

“Shame is a fitter and generally a more effectual punishment for a child than beating.”

“A widow's refusal of a lover is seldom so explicit as to exclude hope.”

“Every one, more or less, loves Power, yet those who most wish for it are seldom the fittest to be trusted with it.”

“As a child is indulged or checked in its early follies, a ground is generally laid for the happiness or misery of the future man.”