Jane Austen Quotes

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

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
Jane Austen

A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.
Jane Austen

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.
Jane Austen

A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Jane Austen

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.
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

Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.
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

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
Jane Austen

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.
Jane Austen

General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.
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

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

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.
Jane Austen

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
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

Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.
Jane Austen

I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
Jane Austen

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
Jane Austen

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
Jane Austen

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
Jane Austen

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.
Jane Austen

If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next.
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.
Jane Austen

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.
Jane Austen

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?
Jane Austen

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.
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

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

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

My sore throats are always worse than anyone's.
Jane Austen

Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.
Jane Austen

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.
Jane Austen

Nobody minds having what is too good for them.
Jane Austen

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.
Jane Austen