I have discovered that our great favourite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman...with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers...

The power of admiring whatever is deserving of admiration, the nice and quick perception of the beautiful and the true, is one of the highest and noblest of our faculties, born of taste, and knowledge, and wisdom, or rather it is taste, and wisdom, and knowledge, in one rare and great combination.

Fashion is a capricious deity.

That bad letters of every kind arise from want of the habit of thinking, I cannot doubt.

We may admire people for being wise, but we like them best when they are foolish.

I detest so much ... those persons, who insist upon telling you everything - who labor every point, as the lawyers say, as if they thought all excellence consisted in length.

Nothing so pretty to look at as my garden!