Jane Austen Quotes

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

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.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! -- When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

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

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.

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

The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!

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

I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

Angry people are not always wise.

I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.

You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.

but for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

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 are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.

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.

I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.

I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.

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

The Very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone.

How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel!

It isn't what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.

Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.

Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.

I have not the pleasure of understanding you.

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

I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control.

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

I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh.

You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.

When I fall in love, it will be forever.

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

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.

I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

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.' 'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.

You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you. -Mr. Darcy

Till this moment I never knew myself.

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.

I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.

He is a gentleman, and I am a gentleman's daughter. So far we are equal.

We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him.

If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.

Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her.

There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison

A girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then. It is something to think of

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.

An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.

The distance is nothing when one has a motive.

I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.

Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like.

Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.

What strange creatures brothers are!

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

It is only a novel... or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language

There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.

Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!

Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than marry without affection.

There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome." "And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them.

Mary wished to say something very sensible, but knew not how.

Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.

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

From the very beginning— from the first moment, I may almost say— of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.

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

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.

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like.

...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.

Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?

It is not everyone,' said Elinor, 'who has your passion for dead leaves.

You must be the best judge of your own happiness.

She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.

Without music, life would be a blank to me.

She was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.

I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant. You alone have brought me to Bath. For you alone, I think and plan. Have you not seen this? Can you fail to have understood my wishes? I had not waited even these ten days, could I have read your feelings, as I think you must have penetrated mine. I can hardly write. I am every instant hearing something which overpowers me. You sink your voice, but I can distinguish the tones of that voice when they would be lost on others. Too good, too excellent creature! You do us justice, indeed. You do believe that there is true attachment and constancy among men. Believe it to be most fervent, most undeviating, in F. W. I must go, uncertain of my fate; but I shall return hither, or follow your party, as soon as possible. A word, a look, will be enough to decide whether I enter your father's house this evening or never.

If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.

You have bewitched me body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. And wish from this day forth never to be parted from you.

It's been many years since I had such an exemplary vegetable.

Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.

I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be...yours.

I will be calm. I will be mistress of myself.

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

All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!

Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing after all.

I certainly have not the talent which some people possess," said Darcy, "of conversing easily with those I have never seen before. I cannot catch their tone of conversation, or appear interested in their concerns, as I often see done.

Let us never underestimate the power of a well-written letter.

I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding. My temper I dare not vouch for. It is, I believe, too little yielding— certainly too little for the convenience of the world. I cannot forget the follies and vices of other so soon as I ought, nor their offenses against myself. My feelings are not puffed about with every attempt to move them. My temper would perhaps be called resentful. My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.

One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.

Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.

But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.

A man does not recover from such devotion of the heart to such a woman! He ought not; he does not.

I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.

She hoped to be wise and reasonable in time; but alas! Alas! She must confess to herself that she was not wise yet.

Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.

I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. 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.

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of a man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire... 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.

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.