Quotes to inspire and reflect

Revenge triumphs over death; love slights it; honour aspireth to it; grief flieth to it.

Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.

Nothing doth more hurt in a state than that cunning men pass for wise.

I knew one that when he wrote a letter he would put that which was most material in the postscript, as if it had been a bymatter.

Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch.

In civil business; what first? boldness; what second and third? boldness: and yet boldness is a child of ignorance and baseness.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Virtue is like a rich stone, best plain set.

I had rather believe all the fables in the legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.

A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

Prosperity doth best discover vice, but adversity doth best discover virtue.

I hold every man a debtor to his profession.

Silence is the virtue of fools.

Ancient times were the youth of the world.

Words are the tokens current and accepted for conceits, as moneys are for values.

A dance is a measured pace, as a verse is a measured speech.

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

I am going to take a heroine whom no-one but myself will much like. on starting Emma

There is nothing to it. You only have to hit the right notes at the right time and the instrument plays itself.

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?

Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick and wicked.

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

3 or 4 families in a country village is the very thing to work on.

From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents.—Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.

May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?

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

All the privilege I claim for my own sex … is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.

‘My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.’ ‘You are mistaken,’ said he gently, ‘that is not good company, that is the best.’

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

Every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open.

Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.

Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.

‘Oh! it is only a novel! … only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda:’ or, in short, only some work 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.

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. It certainly may secure all the myrtle and turkey part of it.

One has no great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

The sooner every party breaks up the better.

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

An egg boiled very soft is not unwholesome.

Mankind have been created for the sake of one another. Either instruct them, therefore, or endure them.

Every instant of time is a pinprick of eternity.

To change your mind and to follow him who sets you right is to be nonetheless the free agent that you were before.

Nothing happens to anybody which he is not fitted by nature to bear.

Everything is fitting for me, my universe, which fits thy purpose. Nothing in its good time is too early or too late for me; everything is fruit for me which thy seasons, Nature, bear; from thee, in thee, to thee, are all things.