Source identified
“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
Voice: Fictional character · Mary Crawford
The line is comic rather than literal advice, using exaggeration to expose how readily people excuse entrenched self-interest.
Source note: Mary Crawford makes the remark while discussing motives and conduct in company.
Source identified
“Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
The joke exaggerates how difficult secrecy becomes once information is shared, making discretion the safest form of confidentiality.
Source note: Poor Richard’s Almanack; one of Franklin’s compact maxims about secrecy and human behavior.
Source identified
“Montmorency’s ambition in life, is to get in the way and be sworn at.”
Voice: Fictional narrator · J. (first-person narrator)
The narrator gives the dog a mock life-purpose centered on obstruction and provoking people, turning ordinary pet mischief into a grand statement of ambition.
Source note: Three Men in a Boat, packing episode; the narrator describes Montmorency repeatedly inserting himself into whatever the men are trying to pack.
Source identified
“Be clothed with humility: for God resisteth the proud, and giveth grace to the humble.”
Humility is described as something practiced visibly in community, not merely an inward opinion about oneself.
Source note: 1 Peter 5:5 in the King James Version; this excerpt keeps the central humility clause.
Source identified
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator
The famous opening exposes assumptions about money, marriage, and social expectations while sounding as if it were stating an unquestionable fact.
Source note: Opening sentence of Chapter 1; the narrator immediately signals the novel’s social irony.
Source identified
“A dog like that don’t want any encouragement. It’s the natural, original sin that is born in him that makes him do things like that.”
Voice: Fictional narrator · J. (first-person narrator)
The mock-theological explanation treats ordinary canine mischief as inherited moral corruption, exaggerating the dog’s nuisance behavior into a theory of original sin.
Source note: Three Men in a Boat, packing episode; the narrator rejects Harris’s claim that he encourages Montmorency’s disruptive behavior.