The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously.... Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.

No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with.

Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable; that one false step involves her in endless ruin; that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful; and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex.

I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

How little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other's ultimate comfort.

We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days.

We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.

To be claimed as a good, though in an improper style, is at least better than being rejected as no good at all.

There is hardly any personal defect which an agreeable manner might not gradually reconcile one to.

The stream is as good as at first; the little rubbish it collects in the turnings is easily moved away.

The only time I ever really suffered in body or mind, the only time that I ever fancied myself unwell, or had any ideas of danger, was the winter that I passed by myself. As long as we could be together, nothing ever ailed me, and I never met with the smallest inconvenience.

She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.

One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.