Mary Wollstonecraft

“ Those who have not any taste talk always of their own affairs or of their neighbours; every trivial matter that occurs within their knowledge they convass and conjecture about—not so much out of ill-nature as idleness: just as you eat the cakes without the impulse of hunger. In the same style people talk of eating and dress, and long for their meals merely to divide the day, because the intermediate time is not employed in a more interesting manner. Every new branch of taste that we cultivate affords us a refuge from idleness, a fortress in which we may resist the assaults of vice ”

“ The Supreme Being has every thing in himself; we proceed from Him, and our knowledge and affections must return to Him for employment suited to them. And those who most resemble Him ought, next to Him, to be the objects of our love; and the beings whom we should try to associate with, that we may receive an inferior degree of satisfaction from their society. But be assured, our chief comfort must ever arise from the mind's reviewing its own operations—and the whispers of an approving conscience, to convince us that life has not slipped away unemployed. ”

“ As the judgment gains strength, so do the passions also; we have actions to weigh, and need that taste in conduct, that delicate sense of propriety, which gives grace to virtue. The highest branch of solitary amusement is reading ”