Quotes from Pride and Prejudice

In vain I have struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.

She is tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me; and I am in no humour at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity to what we would have others think of us.

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

Till this moment I never knew myself.

I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.

You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared me the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner.

An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.

Obstinate, headstrong girl! I am ashamed of you!

Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.

Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.

From the very beginning—from the first moment, I may almost say—of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation.

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.