It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

Jane Austen · The opening sentence of the novel, and probably the most quoted first line in English fiction.

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

Jane Austen · Mr Darcy teasing Miss Bingley in chapter 6, long before he admits his own feelings for Elizabeth; "You have bewitched me, body and soul" is the 2005 film, not the novel.

More Love Quotes

You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.

Rhett Butler · Clark Gable's blockade runner in Gone with the Wind (1939) · Rhett to Scarlett in the Paris bonnet scene, a line written for the film by Sidney Howard and not found in the novel.

I firmly believe that love [of a subject or hobby] is a better teacher than a sense of duty—at least for me.

Albert Einstein · From a 1940 draft letter to his friend the physicist Philipp Frank; the shared "Love is a better teacher than duty" is a shortening, and the bracketed gloss is the editor's.

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.

Attributed to Oscar Wilde · Recorded by Harold Mellor, a friend who travelled with Wilde in 1898 to 1900, and printed only in 1949 in the Marquess of Queensberry's Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas; Quote Investigator finds it plausible but resting on one man's memory half a century on.

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“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”

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

“You should be kissed, and often, and by someone who knows how.”

“I firmly believe that love [of a subject or hobby] is a better teacher than a sense of duty—at least for me.”

“Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.”