Jane Austen
Birthdate: December 16, 1775
Birthplace: Steventon, Hampshire, England, United Kingdom
Date of Death: July 18, 1817
Occupation: Author
Profile: Best known for
Pride and Prejudice.
Website: http://www.austen.com/
Number of Quotes: 98
A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.
Pride and Prejudice
A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from; and he who
can do it, where there is no doubt of her regard, must, I think, be the happiest of mortals.
A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.
A single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid - the proper sport of boys and
girls; but a single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.
A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.
Emma
An artist cannot do anything slovenly.
An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her
cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion.
Mansfield Park
Anything is to be preferred or endured rather than marrying without affection.
Letter to her niece Fanny Knight, November 18, 1814.
Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.
Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.
Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
Every savage can dance.
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Sense and Sensibility
From politics, it was an easy step to silence.
General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.
Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to
one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.
Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.
Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.
Pride and Prejudice
How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations,
that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.
Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.
I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.
Emma
I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.
I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!
Pride and Prejudice
I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
I would have everybody marry if they can do it properly: I do not like to have people
throw themselves away; but everybody should marry as soon as they can do it to advantage.
If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.
If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next.
In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.
Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.
Pride and Prejudice
It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.
It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these
pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?
It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.
It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.
Sense and Sensibility
It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.
It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience—or give it a more fascinating name: call it hope.
Sense and Sensibility
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
Mansfield Park
Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so
much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.
My sore throats are always worse than anyone's.
Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.
No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.
Nobody minds having what is too good for them.
Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.
Nothing, but death.
Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.
Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.
Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
One man's style must not be the rule of another's.
One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.
Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.
Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom
can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.
Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.
Mansfield Park
Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
Emma
Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.
Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Northanger Abbey
The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.
There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them.
There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.
There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.
Emma
There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry.
There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves; it is not my nature.
Northanger Abbey
There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.
There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.
They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.
Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.
Those who do not complain are never pitied.
To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.
To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.
To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking
plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.
To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without
being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.
Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.
Emma
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially
good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.
We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.
What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!
Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.
Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason
to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.
Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it.
Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.
You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone forever.
Persuasion
You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.
Pride and Prejudice
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