Northanger Abbey - Jane Ostin

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

To be always firm must be to be often obstinate. When properly to relax is the trial of judgment.

No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.

If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.

A loss may be sometimes a gain.

It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire; how little it is biased by the texture of their muslin, and how unsusceptible of peculiar tenderness towards the spotted, the sprigged, the mull, or the jackonet. Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.

There are some situations of the human mind in which good sense has very little power.

But strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out.

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.

No young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman's love is declared, it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her.

"I do not understand you."
"Then we are on very unequal terms, for I understand you perfectly well."
"Me? Yes; I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible."

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.

To be always firm must be to be often obstinate. When properly to relax is the trial of judgment.

Their joy on this meeting was very great, as well it might, since they had been contented to know nothing of each other for the last fifteen years.

there is nothing people are so often deceived in as the state of their own affections.

I use the verb 'to torment', as I observed to be your own method, instead of 'to instruct', supposing them to be now admitted as synonymous.