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Source identified
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!
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“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”

Jane Austen

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Source
Pride and Prejudice
Date
1813
Local voice
Fictional character · Caroline Bingley
Meaning

Meaning of “I declare after all there is no enjoyment…”

The line is memorable as praise of reading, though its comic context matters because Miss Bingley says it while performing interest for Darcy.

Source context

Where does it come from?

Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 11; context is ironic.

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Speaker context

Why the local voice matters

Miss Bingley says this in Pride and Prejudice while ostentatiously taking up a book to attract Darcy’s attention.

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“With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.”

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Source details

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Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
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“Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.”

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Meaning & context

Bacon distinguishes what reading, conversation, and writing each contribute to intellectual development.

Source details

Of Studies; Bacon distinguishes the intellectual uses of reading, conversation, and writing within the essay’s compact account of study and judgment.

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Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart.
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“Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart.”

Mary Wollstonecraft · Thoughts on the Education of Daughters · 1787
Meaning & context

Good reading can develop both judgment and moral feeling, making intellectual enlargement and character formation parts of the same educational process.

Source details

Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), “READING,” printed page 49, Project Gutenberg #67466. “Judicious books enlarge the mind and improve the heart” appears in Wollstonecraft’s case for carefully chosen reading that joins intellectual cultivation with moral formation; the passage remains historical educational and conduct writing.

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Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.
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“Experience is merely the name men gave to their mistakes.”

Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray — 1891 edition · 1891
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator, focalized through Lord Henry
Meaning & context

The wit turns “experience” into a retrospective label for errors, suggesting that mistakes become useful only when understood.

Source details

The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 edition, Chapter 4; third-person narration focalized through Lord Henry reflects that experience is the name people give to their mistakes.

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So much patient perseverance could not but eventually succeed
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“So much patient perseverance could not but eventually succeed”

Samuel Smiles · The Life of George Stephenson and of his Son Robert Stephenson · 1868
Meaning & context

Smiles describes Stephenson’s progress in arithmetic as the cumulative result of study and patient persistence rather than easy aptitude.

Source details

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