Quotes on Wit
The wit is the reason the rest survives. Austen's irony works by letting foolish people condemn themselves in their own words and letting clever people say true things at the wrong moment. Half of the lines below are spoken by characters the novels do not endorse — which is exactly the game: she trusts the reader to hear the difference between what a character believes and what the narration actually shows to be true. Mr. Bennet's driest lines are funny precisely because his wit coexists with real parental negligence; Mary Bennet's pronouncements on vanity and pride are technically correct and land as pompous anyway, because she has no idea how little she understands the people she's lecturing. This is Austen's most durable technical achievement: comedy built entirely from the gap between a speaker's self-image and the reader's more accurate view of them.
“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.”
“Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.”
“Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.”
“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”
“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”
“I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me.”
“Till this moment, I never knew myself.”
“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”
“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.”
“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
“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!”
“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. The pen has been in their hands.”
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
“Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked.”
“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
“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.”
“A single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else.”
“Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.”
“Time will explain.”
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
“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.”
“Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.”
“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
“What are men to rocks and mountains?”