Mansfield Park

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

I was quiet, but I was not blind.

A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself.

Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.

There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

Let us have the luxury of silence.

But indeed I would rather have nothing but tea.

Fanny! You are killing me!" "No man dies of love but on the stage, Mr. Crawford.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

But there certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are pretty women to deserve them.

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.

I was so anxious to do what is right that I forgot to do what is right.

[N]obody minds having what is too good for them.

I have no talent for certainty.

Everybody likes to go their own way–to choose their own time and manner of devotion.

You have qualities which I had not before supposed to exist in such a degree in any human creature. You have some touches of the angel in you.

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

…but then I am unlike other people I dare say.

Oh! write, write. Finish it at once. Let there be an end of this suspense. Fix, commit, condemn yourself.

I understand Crawford paid you a visit?" "Yes." "And was he attentive?" "Yes, very." "And has your heart changed towards him?" "Yes. Several times. I have - I find that I - I find that-" "Shh. Surely you and I are beyond speaking when words are clearly not enough.... I missed you." "And I you.

I am very strong. Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like.

But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.

Sitting with her on Sunday evening — a wet Sunday evening — the very time of all others when if a friend is at hand the heart must be opened, and every thing told…

She was feeling, thinking, trembling about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry.

Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.