“I like to use significant words.”

The greater number of people take their opinions on trust, to avoid the trouble of exercising their own minds, and these indolent beings naturally adhere to the letter, rather than the spirit of a law, divine or human.

I never wanted but your heart-that gone, you have nothing more to give.

They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent.

Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?

She would stand and behold the waves rolling, and think of the voice that could still the tumultuous deep.

Every glance afforded colouring for the picture she was delineating on her heart.

Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.

Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wishes the force of passions.

Modesty, temperance, and self-denial, are the sober offspring of reason.

How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty!

They are the men of fancy, the favourites of the sex, who outwardly respect, and inwardly despise the weak creatures whom they thus sport with.

It may be impossible to convince women that the illegitimate power which they obtain by degrading themselves is a curse.

Pope’s summary of their character to be just, that every woman is at heart a rake.

Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.

I do not believe that I’m sacrificing, in fact I feel very uneasy when others used the word sacrifice to describe my life. It sounds like I’m demanding returns for my investments.

Far and away the most changes are the result of mistakes pure and simple slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, blunders of one sort or another.

There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know where they’ll take you.

A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it… By using words well they strengthen their souls.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.

In the heavens we discover [stars] by their light, and by their light alone … the sole evidence of the existence of these distant worlds … that each of them is built up of molecules of the same kinds we find on earth.