1. “A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”
2. "A man who has nothing to do with his own time has no conscience in his intrusion on that of others."
3. "And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess?"
4. “An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.”
5. ”A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.”
6. “But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.”
7. "Fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward."
8. “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”
9. "Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."
10. "Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly anybody to love."
11. “Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.”
12. "I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them."
13. "If I loved a man as she loves the Admiral I would always be with him, nothing should ever separate us, and I would rather be overturned by him, than driven safely by anybody else."
14. “In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided among the sexes.”
15. “In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.”
16. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”
17. “Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”
18. “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.”
19. “Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.”
20. “Oh it is only a novel!.... in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”
21. "One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering."
22. "One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.''
23. "There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry . It is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves."
24. “There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”
25. “There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.”
26. "Those who do not complain are never pitied."
27. ”To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.”
28. “Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?”
29. ”Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?”
30. “With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works.”
