Jane Austen Quotes

“Do any thing rather than marry without affection.”

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”

“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.”

“Wisdom is better than wit, and in the long run will certainly have the laugh on her side.”

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”

“Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.”

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.”

“You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”

“I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me.”

“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”

“In short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature... are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.”

“Till this moment, I never knew myself.”

“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”

“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?”

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can.”

“The little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush, as produces little effect after much labour.”

“I have loved none but you.”

“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”

“There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”

“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”

“There is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!”

“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.”

“Obstinate, headstrong girl!”

“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”

“Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. The pen has been in their hands.”

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

“Pictures of perfection as you know make me sick & wicked.”

“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”

“Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well-informed mind, is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others.”

“A single woman, of good fortune, is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as any body else.”

“Surprizes are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.”

“3 or 4 Families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.”

“Time will explain.”

“You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

“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.”

“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.”

“If a book is well written, I always find it too short.”

“What are men to rocks and mountains?”

“I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.”