Emma

“A few minutes were sufficient for making her acquainted with her own heart.”

“A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter.”

“And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess? I pity you. I thought you cleverer; for depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it.”

“At Christmas every body invites their friends and thinks little of even the worst weather.”

“Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.”

“Blessed with so many resources within myself the world was not necessary to me. I could do very well without it.”

“Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.”

“Evil to some is always good to others.”

“Fine dancing, I believe, like virtue, must be its own reward.”

“How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!”

“I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other.”

“I certainly will not persuade myself to feel more than I do. I am quite enough in love. I should be sorry to be more.”

“I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.”

“I would much rather have been merry than wise.”

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”

“It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for any body who asks her.”

“It is not every man’s fate to marry the woman who loves him best.”

“It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.”

“It is very unfair to judge of any body’s conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation.”

“It may be possible to do without dancing entirely.”

“It was foolish, it was wrong, to take so active a part in bringing any two people together.”

“Miss Bates had never boasted either beauty or cleverness. […]. And yet she was a happy woman, and a woman whom no one named without good will.”

“Never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man’s eyes as I am in my father’s.”

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.”

“Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”

“The real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself: these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.”

“Then I examined my own heart. And there you were. Never, I fear, to be removed.”

“There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.”

“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”

“Time, you may be sure, will make one or the other of us think differently; and, in the meanwhile, we need not talk much on the subject.”

“What is passable in youth is detestable in later age.”

“Where the wound had been given, there must the cure be found, if any where.”

“Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.”

“With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody’s feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing—for she had done mischief.”

“You must be the best judge of your own happiness.”