“I like to use significant words.”

If children are to be educated to understand the true principle of patriotism, their mother must be a patriot.

The appetites will rule if the mind is vacant.

The honour of the woman is not made even to depend on her will.

It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

Virtue flies from a house divided against itself—and a whole legion of devils take up their residence there.

I do not wish them women to have power over men; but over themselves.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sculpture the mind shapes itself to the body and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

True sensibility, the sensibility which is the auxiliary of virtue, and the soul of genius, is in society so occupied with the feelings of others, as scarcely to regard its own sensations.

Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being to her duty.

Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to their sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

Few, I believe, have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with.

We must all be in love once in our lives.

The man who had some virtue whilst he was struggling for a crown, often becomes a voluptuous tyrant when it graces his brow.

Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.

I gazed around with rapture, and felt more of that spontaneous pleasure which gives credibility to our expectation of happiness than I had for a long, long time before.

Men of genius and talents have started out of a class, in which women have never yet been placed.

As ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science, without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.

I hate the idea of always having to interpret other people’s ideas and thoughts and words, because I’m very independent and, I guess, a free thinker.

Be honest about what you can get. To make a sacrifice and to get what you want you need to be very certain. In other words: always think about your objective, have a clear goal and commit to it from the heart.

I want my words to survive translation.

Don’t allow your actions to betray your words!

I put the words down and push them a bit.

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

It seems to me, sorry seems to be the hardest word.