Look at your [English] ladies of quality are they not forever parting with their husbands - forfeiting their reputations - and is their life aught but dissipation? In common genteel life, indeed, you may now and then meet with very fine girls - who have politeness, sense and conversation - but these are few - and then look at your trademen's daughters - what are they? poor creatures indeed! all pertness, imitation and folly.

Fanny Burney

Categorized in : Girl Husband Daughter

I am ashamed of confessing that I have nothing to confess.

Fanny Burney

women ashamed memorable

Nothing is so delicate as the reputation of a woman; it is at once the most beautiful and most brittle of all human things.

Fanny Burney

delicate reputation beautiful

Travelling is the ruin of all happiness. There's no looking at a building here after seeing Italy.

Fanny Burney

ruins building travel

I wish the opera was every night. It is, of all entertainments, the sweetest and most delightful. Some of the songs seemed to melt my very soul.

Fanny Burney

soul song night

Credulity is the sister of innocence.

Fanny Burney

gullibility credulity innocence

How little has situation to do with happiness. The happy individual uses their intelligence to realise things could be worse and therefore is grateful and happy. The unhappy individual does the opposite!

Fanny Burney

gratitude grateful opposites

How truly does this journal contain my real and undisguised thoughts--I always write it according to the humour I am in, and if astranger was to think it worth reading, how capricious--insolent & whimsical I must appear!--one moment flighty and half mad,--the next sad and melancholy. No matter! Its truth and simplicity are its sole recommendations.

Fanny Burney

real reading writing

Generosity without delicacy, like wit without judgment, generally gives as much pain as pleasure.

Fanny Burney

generosity pain giving

For my part, I confess I seldom listen to the players: one has so much to do, in looking about and finding out one's acquaintance, that, really, one has no time to mind the stage. One merely comes to meet one's friends, and show that one's alive.

Fanny Burney

finding-the-one player mind

Imagination took the reins, and reason, slow-paced, though sure-footed, was unequal to a race with so eccentric and flighty a companion.

Fanny Burney

eccentric imagination race

Insensibility, of all kinds, and on all occasions, most moves my imperial displeasure

Fanny Burney

all-occasions kind moving

A little alarm now and then keeps life from stagnation.

Fanny Burney

alarms now-and-then littles

Tis best to build no castles in the air.

Fanny Burney

castles-in-the-air castles air

I am too inexperienced and ignorant to conduct myself with propriety in this town, where every thing is new to me, and many things are unaccountable and perplexing.

Fanny Burney

propriety ignorant towns

such is the effect of true politeness, that it banishes all restraint and embarassment.

Fanny Burney

politeness restraint effects

To save the mind from preying inwardly upon itself, it must be encouraged to some outward pursuit.

Fanny Burney

pursuit be-encouraged mind

To despise riches, may, indeed, be philosophic, but to dispense them worthily, must surely be more beneficial to mankind.

Fanny Burney

riches wealth may

I love and honour [Paulus Aemilius, in Plutarch's Lives], for his fondness for his children, which instead of blushing at, he avows and glories in: and that at an age, when almost all the heros and great men thought that to make their children and family a secondary concern, was the first proof of their superiority and greatness of soul.

Fanny Burney

greatness hero children

Unused to the situations in which I find myself, and embarassed by the slightest difficulties, I seldom discover, till too late, how I ought to act.

Fanny Burney

difficulty situation too-late

While all the pomp and circumstance of war animated others, it only saddened me; and all of past reflection, all of future dread, made the whole grandeur of the martial scene, and all the delusive seduction of martial music, fill my eyes frequently with tears.

Fanny Burney

eye war past