Love resembles epidemic diseases: the more one fears them, the more liable is one to infection.
In witnessing or experiencing the pains inseparable from intense feeling in love and friendship, be it by the death of the loved person or by the accidents of life, one is tempted to believe that dissipation and frivolity are not such great follies after all, and that life is scarce worth more than what fashionable folk make of it.
Marriage follows on love as smoke on flame.
Love gives greater pleasure than marriage for the same reason that romances are more amusing than history.
One of the best reasons you can have for never marrying is not so much that you are the woman’s dupe as that she is not yours.