Pride and Prejudice

by Jane Austen

Affectation of candour is common enough—one meets with it everywhere. But to be candid without ostentation or design—to take the good of everybody’s character and make it still better, and say nothing of the bad—belongs to you alone.

Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

“But if a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavour to conceal it, he must find it out.”

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.

I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”

Me.

“Your humility, Mr. Bingley,” said Elizabeth, “must disarm reproof.”

Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can. But these, I suppose, are precisely what you are without.”

many of my fellow-creatures if I am tempted, or how am I even to know that it would be wisdom to resist?

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

Reflection must be reserved for solitary hours; whenever she was alone, she gave way to it as the greatest relief; and not a day went by without a solitary walk, in which she might indulge in all the delight of unpleasant recollections.

to banish from her thoughts that continual breach of conjugal obligation and decorum which, in exposing his wife to the contempt of her own children, was so highly reprehensible.

But it was her business to be satisfied—and certainly her temper to be happy;

What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?

Her own thoughts were employing her. She expected every moment that some of the gentlemen would enter the room. She wished, she feared that the master of the house might be amongst them; and whether she wished or feared it most, she could scarcely determine.

in a family so deranged, a father absent, a mother incapable of exertion, and requiring constant attendance; and though almost persuaded that nothing could be done for Lydia,

Assistance is impossible; condolence insufferable.

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

I know that you could be neither happy nor respectable, unless you truly esteemed your husband; unless you looked up to him as a superior.

I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.”