The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

‘Love and Freindship’ (written 1790) ‘Letter the 13th’
The true London maxim, that everything is to be got with money.
‘Mansfield Park’ (1814) ch. 6 (Mary Crawford)
We do not look in great cities for our best morality.
‘Mansfield Park’ (1814) ch. 9 (Edmund Bertram)
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. It certainly may secure all the
myrtle and turkey part of it.
‘Mansfield Park’ (1814) ch. 22
Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of an Englishman’s
constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere,
one is intimate with him by instinct.
‘Mansfield Park’ (1814) ch. 34 (Henry Crawford)
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.
‘Mansfield Park’ (1814) ch. 48
He feared that principle, active principle, had been wanting, that they had never been properly
taught to govern their inclinations and tempers, by that sense of duty which can alone suffice.
They had been instructed theoretically in their religion, but never required to bring it into daily
practice.
‘Mansfield Park’ (1814) ch. 48 (of Sir Thomas Bertram)
‘Oh! it is only a novel!...only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda:’ or, in short, only some work in
which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the
liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.
‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818) ch. 5
Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?
‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818) ch. 10 (Catherine Morland)
Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in....The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or
pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.
‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818) ch. 14 (Catherine Morland)
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. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing
any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.
‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818) ch. 14
From politics, it was an easy step to silence.
‘Northanger Abbey’ (1818) ch. 14
Remember the country and the age we live in. Remember that we are English, that we are
Christians....Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them?
Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary
intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary
spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open?