Quotes by Samuel Richardson

“My Master said, on another Occasion, that those who doubt most, always erred least.”

“That dangerous but too commonly received notion, that a reformed rake makes the best husband.”

“The person who will bear much shall have much to bear, all the world through.”

“The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.”

“I am forced, as I have often said, to try to make myself laugh, that I may not cry: for one or other I must do.”

“Love gratified, is love satisfied — and love satisfied, is indifference begun.”

“Nothing can be more wounding to a spirit not ungenerous, than a generous forgiveness.”

“Vast is the field of Science … the more a man knows, the more he will find he has to know.”

“The World, thinking itself affronted by superior merit, takes delight to bring it down to its own level.”

“Those who have least to do are generally the most busy people in the world.”

“A feeling heart is a blessing that no one, who has it, would be without; and it is a moral security of innocence; since the heart that is able to partake of the distress of another, cannot wilfully...”

“There hardly can be a greater difference between any two men, than there too often is, between the same man, a lover and a husband.”

“Of what violences, murders, depredations, have not the epic poets, from all antiquity, been the occasion, by propagating false honour, false glory, and false religion?”

“The mind can be but full. It will be as much filled with a small disagreeable occurrence, having no other, as with a large one.”

“The pen is almost as pretty an implement in a woman's fingers, as a needle.”

“I finished Pamela which I had been reading at Southsea. The last volume is a tedious anticlimax, but otherwise I enjoyed it immensely. One can hardly believe our habits and values will ever seem as...”

“Erskine: Surely, Sir, Richardson is very tedious.Johnson: Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must...”

“Richardson is the first of our novelists who set the fashion of concentrating all the interest of human life upon the war between man and woman. With what wondrous patience he depicts the siege of ...”

“While Richardson has been thus influential over the greatest authors of prose fiction on the Continent, he has been no less potent over the very feeblest of such writers as we in England read but d...”

“This is the creative spirit who, by means of instructive stories, commands us to feel the charm of virtue; who, by means of Grandison, extorts from the sinner himself a first wish to be pious also....”