Jane Austen

You must be the best judge of your own happiness.

I have changed my mind, and changed the trimmings of my cap this morning; they are now such as you suggested.

I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.

I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.

Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.

If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I will never be tricked into it.

I understand you.__ou do not suppose that I have ever felt much.__or four months, Marianne, I have had all this hanging on my mind, without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature; knowing that it would make you and my mother most unhappy whenever it were explained to you, yet unable to prepare you for it in the least._ It was told me,__t was in a manner forced on me by the very person herself, whose prior engagement ruined all my prospects; and told me, as I thought, with triumph._ This person's suspicions, therefore, I have had to oppose, by endeavouring to appear indifferent where I have been most deeply interested;__nd it has not been only once;__ have had her hopes and exultation to listen to again and again._ I have known myself to be divided from Edward for ever, without hearing one circumstance that could make me less desire the connection.__othing has proved him unworthy; nor has anything declared him indifferent to me._ I have had to contend against the unkindness of his sister, and the insolence of his mother; and have suffered the punishment of an attachment, without enjoying its advantages._ And all this has been going on at a time, when, as you know too well, it has not been my only unhappiness._ If you can think me capable of ever feeling__urely you may suppose that I have suffered NOW. The composure of mind with which I have brought myself at present to consider the matter, the consolation that I have been willing to admit, have been the effect of constant and painful exertion;__hey did not spring up of themselves;__hey did not occur to relieve my spirits at first._ No, Marianne.__HEN, if I had not been bound to silence, perhaps nothing could have kept me entirely__ot even what I owed to my dearest friends__rom openly shewing that I was VERY unhappy.

It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering.

He had suffered, and he had learnt to think, two advantages that he had never known before_

We do not suffer by accident.

Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.

But think no more of the letter. The feelings of the person who wrote, and the person who received it, are now so widely different from what they were then, that every unpleasant circumstance attending it ought to be forgotten. You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

In books too, as well as in music, she courted the misery which a contrast between the past and present was certain of giving.

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

Everybody pretends to feel and tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind, and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in but what was worn and hackneyed out of all sense and meaning.

Marianne could never love by halves; and her whole heart became, in time, as much devoted to her husband, as it had once been to Willoughby.

Elinor had some difficulty here to refrain from observing, that she thought Fanny might have borne with composure, an acquisition of wealth to her brother, by which neither she nor her child could be possibly impoverished.

If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.