“I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”

“You have no ambition, I well know. Your wishes are all moderate.''As moderate as those of the rest of the world, I believe. I wish as well as every body else to be perfectly happy, but like every body else it must be in my own way. Greatness will not make me so.”

“Everybody likes to go their own way–to choose their own time and manner of devotion.”

“for everybody must now 'move in a circle', - to the prevalence of which rotatory motion, is perhaps to be attributed the giddiness and false steps of many.”

“I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.”

“Money can only give happiness where there is nothing else to give it.”

“To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of 26 and 18 is to do pretty well”