Emotions and Feelings

‘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.’

Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?

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.

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.

The sooner every party breaks up the better.

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

Too late came I to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee.

Tolle lege, tolle lege.

Give me chastity and continency—but not yet!

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

History to the defeated

A poet’s hope: to be,

But who can live for long

Even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

About suffering they were never wrong,

In the deserts of the heart

In the deserts of the heart

Intellectual disgrace

In the nightmare of the dark

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews