“Let us eat, drink, and love for tomorrow we die, would be in fact the language of reason, the morality of life; and who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow?”

Happy would it be for women, if they were only flattered by the men who loved them; I mean, who love the individual, not the sex.

In short, women, in general, as well as the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization, and missed the useful fruit.

Without the aid of the imagination all the pleasures of the senses must sink into grossness.

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

Either nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the world is not yet anywhere near to being fully civilized.

I like to use significant words.

I have sighed when obliged to confess that either Nature has made a great difference between man and man, or that the civilization which has hitherto taken place in the world has been very partial.

My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.

Thus do we wish as we float down the stream of life, whilst chance does more to gratify our desire for knowledge than our best-laid plans.

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

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he just mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, rather than to root them out.

Into this error men have, probably, been led by viewing education in a false light; not considering it as the first step to form a being advancing gradually towards perfection; but only as a preparation for life.

All power inebriates weak man; and its abuse proves that the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society.

Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

Still the men stand up for the dignity of man, by oppressing the women.

Whenever death may surprise us, let it be welcome if our battle cry has reached even one receptive ear and another hand reaches out to take up our arms.

The only difference between death and taxes is that death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

The connections we make in the course of a life, maybe that’s what heaven is.

Life has the name of life, but in reality it is death.

But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.

Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.

When I die, I want to die like my grandfather who died peacefully in his sleep. Not screaming like all the passengers in his car.

Time is meant to be wasted, love fails and death is useless.