Mansfield Park Quotes

“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”

“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.”

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

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

“Here’s harmony!” said she; “here’s repose! Here’s what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what poetry only can attempt to describe! Here’s what may tranquilize every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.”

“Everybody likes to go their own way—to choose their own time and manner of devotion.”

“I think it ought not to be set down as certain that a man must be acceptable to every woman he may happen to like himself.”

“When people are waiting, they are bad judges of time, and every half minute seems like five.”

If reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.

“I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman’s feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.”

“A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.”

“To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure, is the most perfect refreshment.”

“You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at.”

Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.

Every moment had its pleasure and its hope.

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

“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 beyond what—not merely beyond what one sees, because one never sees anything like it—but beyond what one fancies might be. ”

“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.”

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

“I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.”

“Don’t imagine that nobody in this house can see or judge but yourself. Don’t act yourself, if you do not like it, but don’t expect to govern everybody else.”

I only entreat everybody to believe that exactly at the time when it was quite natural that it should be so, and not a week earlier, Edmund did cease to care about Miss Crawford, and became as anxious to marry Fanny as Fanny herself could desire.

“There, I will stake my last like a woman of spirit. No cold prudence for me. I am not born to sit still and do nothing. If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving or it”

She had probably alienated love by the helplessness and fretfulness of a fearful temper, or been unreasonable in wanting a larger share than any one among so many could deserve

Henry Crawford had too much sense not to feel the worth of a good principles in a wife, though he was to little accustomed to serious reflection to know them by their proper name.