Love is the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died: Johnson said, it was the triumph of hope over experience.

I would advise no man to marry who is not likely to propagate understanding.

It is so far from being natural for a man and woman to live in a state of marriage, that we find all the motives which they have for remaining in that connection, and the restraints which civilised society imposes to prevent separation, are hardly sufficient to keep them together.

If a man is in doubt whether it would be better for him to expose himself to martyrdom or not, he should not do it. He must be convinced that he has a delegation from heaven.

It is unjust to claim the privileges of age, and retain the playthings of childhood.

It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive ... that the mind might perform its functions without incumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.

Memory is like all other human powers, with which no man can be satisfied who measures them by what he can conceive, or by what he can desire.

Go into the street, and give one man a lecture on morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you most.

Be not too hasty to trust or to admire the teachers of morality: they discourse like angels, but they live like men.