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Quotes by Jane Austen

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
– Jane Austen
A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
– Jane Austen
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. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.
– Jane Austen
Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.
– Jane Austen
Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
– Jane Austen
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?
– Jane Austen
From politics, it was an easy step to silence.
– Jane Austen
Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
– Jane Austen
It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.
– Jane Austen
It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
– Jane Austen
Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
– Jane Austen
Nobody minds having what is too good for them.
– Jane Austen
One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
– Jane Austen
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.
– Jane Austen
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
– Jane Austen
One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.
– Jane Austen
Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.
– Jane Austen
Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.
– Jane Austen
There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.
– Jane Austen
Those who do not complain are never pitied.
– Jane Austen
To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
– Jane Austen
We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.
– Jane Austen
We met Dr. Hall in such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.
– Jane Austen
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
– Jane Austen
Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.
– Jane Austen
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!
– Jane Austen
With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works.
– Jane Austen
You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;-- it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.
– Jane Austen
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.
– Jane Austen
I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.
– Jane Austen
Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
– Jane Austen
Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
– Jane Austen
Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.
– Jane Austen
I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman's feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.
– Jane Austen
I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
– Jane Austen
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
– Jane Austen
Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.
– Jane Austen
The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.
– Jane Austen
There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.
– Jane Austen
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
– Jane Austen
Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or...of something else.
– Jane Austen
But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.
– Jane Austen
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
– Jane Austen
In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.
– Jane Austen
There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them.
– Jane Austen
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
– Jane Austen
Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.
– Jane Austen
One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.
– Jane Austen
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.
– Jane Austen
General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.
– Jane Austen
A lady's imagination is very rapid it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.
– Jane Austen