Persuasion Quotes

“My idea of good company...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.”

“A man does not recover from such devotion of the heart to such a woman! He ought not; he does not.”

“...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”

“For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.”

“Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time… if you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated.”

Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.

When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.

If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.

Thus much indeed he was obliged to acknowledge – that he had been constant unconsciously, nay unintentionally; that he had meant to forget her, and believed it to be done. He had imagined himself indifferent, when he had only been angry; and he had been unjust to her merits, because he had been a sufferer from them.

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!

“She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! Alas! She must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.”

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.”

“There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison”

“One man’s ways may be as good as another’s, but we all like our own best.”

“Time will explain.”

Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death.

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman’s inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman’s fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men.

Nor could she help feeling, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.

I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.

If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred and all duty violated.

Now they were as strangers; worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted.

Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.

She understood him. He could not forgive her,-but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjest resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impuse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.

“The last few hours were certainly very painful,” replied Anne: “but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering-”

She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.

I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve.