Date: 1782

"A strong sense of DUTY, a fervent desire to ACT RIGHT, were the ruling characteristics of her mind: her affluence she therefore considered as a debt contracted with the poor, and her independence, as a tie upon her liberality to pay it with interest."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"'Put me, if you please, to some trial!' cried Cecilia, with the virtuous courage of a self-acquitting conscience."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"All that pride could demand, and all to which ambition could aspire, all that happiness could cover or the most scrupulous delicacy exact, in her I found united; and while my heart was enslaved by her charms, my understanding exulted in its fetters."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"[A]cquainted ere you meet that you were to meet him no more, your heart would be all softness and grief, and at the very moment when tenderness should be banished from your intercourse, it would bear down all opposition of judgment, spirit, and dignity: you would hang upon every word, because ev...

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"Do not, then, wish me ill, ill as I have seemed to merit of you, for my own heart is almost broken by the tyranny I have been compelled to practice upon yours."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1782

"Passion not merely banished his justice, but clouded his reason, and I soon left the room, that at least I might not hear the aspersions he forbid me to answer."

— Burney [married name D'Arblay], Frances (1752-1840)

Date: 1788

"These propensities gave the colour to her mind, before the passions began to exercise their tyrannic sway, and particularly pointed out those which the soil would have a tendency to nurse."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

"He had been the slave of beauty, the captive of sense; love he ne'er had felt; the mind never rivetted the chain, nor had the purity of it made the body appear lovely in his eyes."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1788

"Where her ruling passions, (the love of admiration and excessive vanity) did not interfere, she was sometimes generous and sometimes friendly."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1788

"Emmeline was unable to reply; and Miss Galton finding no gratification to her curiosity, which, mingled with envious malignity, had long been her ruling passion, was obliged to quit the unhappy Emmeline; which was indeed the only favour she could do her."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)