Jane Austen

You are very fond of bending little minds; but where little minds belong to rich people in authority, I think they have a knack of swelling out, till they are quite as unmanageable as great ones.

Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth.

Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your happiness.__ Jane Austen (Pride & Prejudice)

But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude. -- Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this accidental meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance, and without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister.

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient - at others, so bewildered and so weak - and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! - We are to be sure a miracle every way - but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting, do seem peculiarly past finding out.

A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett)

He then departed, to make himself still more interesting, in the midst of an heavy rain.

Poverty is a great evil, but to a woman of education and feeling it ought not, it cannot be the greatest.__ would rather be a teacher at a school (and I can think of nothing worse) than marry a man I did not like.

But the same spirits of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer-lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachment. Nay, it would be too hard upon you, if it were otherwise. You have difficulties, and privations, and dangers enough to struggle with... It would be too hard indeed (with a faltering voice) if woman's feelings were to be added to all this!

That would be the greatest misfortune of all! -- To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! -- Do not wish me such an evil.

I assure you. I have no notion of treating men with such respect. That is the way to spoil them.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?

They all went indoors with their new friends, and found rooms so small as none but those who invite from the heart could think capable of accommodating so many.

There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature

Mr. ***** is blessed with such happy manners as may ensure his making friends -- whether he may be equally capable of retaining them, is less certain.

We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured... It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us.