Miserable is the fate of writers: if they are agreeable, they are offensive; and if dull, they starve.

Civility costs nothing, and buys everything.

There is nothing can pay one for that invaluable ignorance which is the companion of youth, those sanguine groundless hopes, and that lively vanity which makes all the happiness of life.

People wish their enemies dead - but I do not; I say give them the gout, give them the stone!

No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.

Nobody can deny but religion is a comfort to the distressed, a cordial to the sick, and sometimes a restraint on the wicked.

There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.

The ultimate end of your education was to make you a good wife.

There can be no situation in life in which the conversation of my dear sister will not administer some comfort to me.

I prefer liberty to chains of diamonds.

Solitude begets whimsies.

My pathways are defined by the Creator.

We are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known

Looking back, I remember telling my daughters that we didn't have money, pizzazz and a lot of the things we have today, but we had so much love and we lived like millionaires.

The creative person prefers the richness of the disordered to the stark barrenness of the simple.

Today, as yesterday, a nation is judged by its attitude towards refugees.

No, but a cello is the perfect string bass for an accordion. Works with it beautifully.

The lady ... is an anomaly to which the western nations of this planet have grown accustomed but which would require a great deal of explanation before a Martian could understand her.

I love humility in a woman. It's so rare. With man, of course, it is practically extinct.

It's a whydunnit in q-sharp major and it has a message: never talk to the sort of girls that you wouldn't leave lying about in your drawing-room for the servants to pick up.

Sometimes it takes you awhile to get to it, but you always get there, and what you say is always worth waiting for.