Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

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

"There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me."

"I have been used to consider poetry as "the food of love"said Darcy."Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what isstrong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, Iam convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away."

"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. 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."

"Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly."

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

"Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than marry without affection."

"There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.""And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody.""And yours,"he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them."

"There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it."

"Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain."

"We must not be so ready to fancy ourselves intentionally injured. We must not expect a lively young man to be always so guarded and circumspect. It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does."

"It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?"

"Every impulse of feeling should be guided by reason; and, in my opinion, exertion should always be in proportion to what is required."

"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)"