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All human excellence is but comparative — there are persons who excel us, as much as we fancy we excel the meanest.

Samuel Richardson

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Samuel Richardson
Age: 73 †
Born: 1687
Born: August 19
Died: 1761
Died: July 4
Novelist
Writer
S. Richardson
Humans
Comparative
Much
Meanest
Excel
Fancy
Excellence
May
Persons
Human

More quotes by Samuel Richardson

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Great allowances ought to be made for the petulance of persons labouring under ill-health.
Samuel Richardson
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Reverence to a woman in courtship is less to be dispensed with, as, generally, there is but little of it shown afterwards.
Samuel Richardson
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It is a happy art to know when one has said enough. I would leave my hearers wishing me to say more rather than give them cause toshow, by their inattention, that I had said too much.
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By my soul, I can neither eat, drink, nor sleep nor, what's still worse, love any woman in the world but her.
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Whenever we approve, we can find a hundred good reasons to justify our approbation. Whenever we dislike, we can find a thousand to justify our dislike.
Samuel Richardson
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What a world is this! What is there in it desirable? The good we hope for so strangely mixed, that one knows not what to wish for!And one half of mankind tormenting the other, and being tormented themselves in tormenting!
Samuel Richardson
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Virtue only is the true beauty.
Samuel Richardson
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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 give it.
Samuel Richardson
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Marriage is the highest state of friendship. If happy, it lessens our cares by dividing them, at the same time that it doubles our pleasures by mutual participation.
Samuel Richardson
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The wife of a self-admirer must expect a very cold and negligent husband.
Samuel Richardson
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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.
Samuel Richardson
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Spiritual pride is the most dangerous and the most arrogant of all sorts of pride.
Samuel Richardson
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The little words in the Republic of Letters, like the little folks in a nation, are the most useful and significant.
Samuel Richardson
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The coyest maids make the fondest wives.
Samuel Richardson
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Platonic love is platonic nonsense.
Samuel Richardson
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Youth is rather to be pitied than envied by people in years since it is doomed to toil through the rugged road of life which the others have passed through, in search of happiness that is not to be met with in it and that, at the highest, can be compounded for only by the blessing of a contented mind.
Samuel Richardson
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A man who flatters a woman hopes either to find her a fool or to make her one.
Samuel Richardson
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Friendship is the perfection of love, and superior to love it is love purified, exalted, proved by experience and a consent of minds. Love, Madam, may, and love does, often stop short of friendship.
Samuel Richardson
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Those commands of superiors which are contrary to our first duties are not to be obeyed.
Samuel Richardson
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Romances in general are calculated rather to fire the imagination, than to inform the judgment.
Samuel Richardson