With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody’s feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing – for she had done mischief. She had brought evil on Harriet, on herself, and she too much feared, on Mr. Knightley.
– Jane Austen
Emma, Chapter 47. A self-aware Emma acknowledges that her vanity led her to meddling in other people’s lives and causing them harm with her misperceptions. She accepts how arrogant it was to think herself an expert on people’s feelings so she could arrange their destinies. In her moment of clarity, epiphany and self-discovery, she hyperbolically describes what she did to her friends as evil, her arrogance as unpardonable and vanity as insufferable.