Youth has its romance, and maturity its wisdom, as morning and spring have their freshness, noon and summer their power, night and winter their repose. Each attribute is good in its own season.
You had no right to be born; for you make no use of life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength.
Jane, I never meant to wound you thus. . . Will you ever forgive me?" Reader, I forgave him at the moment and on the spot.
It is not violence that best overcomes hate -- nor vengeance that most certainly heals injury.
No mockery in the world ever sounds to me as hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure.
If life be a war, it seemed my destiny to conduct it single-handed.
Children can feel, but they cannot analyse their feelings; and if the analysis is partially effected in thought, they know not how to express the result of the process in words.
You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this - if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to new.
I had not seen "Pride and Prejudice," till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses.
Spring drew on. . . and a greenness grew over those brown beds, which, freshening daily, suggested the thought that hope traversed them at night and left each morning brighter traces of her steps.
Who has words at the right moment?
But where are you going to, Helen? Can you see? Do you know?-I believe; I have faith: I am going to God. -Where is God? What is God?-My maker and yours, who will never destroy what He created. I rely implicitly on His power, and confide wholly in His goodness: I count the hours till that eventful one arrives which shall restore me to Him, reveal Him to me.
I shall be thirty-one next birthday. My youth is gone like a dream; and very little use have I ever made of it. What have I done these last thirty years? Precious little.
I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest -- blest beyond what language can express; because I am my husband's life as fully as he is mine.
Well had Solomon said,'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.
There are not unfrequently substantial reasons underneath for customs that appear to us absurd; and if I were ever again to find myself amongst strangers, I should be solicitous to examine before I condemned.
For I too liked reading, thought of a frivolous and childish kind; I could not digest or comprehend the serious or substantial.
I can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance what I have always said in theory Wait God's will.
That to begin with; let respect be the foundation, affection the first floor, love the superstructure.
I wished critics would judge me as an author, not as a woman.