“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
“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”
― 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
“One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
― 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
“A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”
― Jane Austen
“General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.”
― Jane Austen
“To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.”
― 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
“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
― 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
“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
― Jane Austen
“There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.”
― Jane Austen
“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
― Jane Austen
“Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.”
― Jane Austen
“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
― Jane Austen
“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.”
― Jane Austen
“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.”
― Jane Austen
“Every savage can dance.”
― Jane Austen
“One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s.”
― Jane Austen
“It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.”
― Jane Austen
“Is not general incivility the very essence of love?”
― Jane Austen
“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.”
― Jane Austen
“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.”
― 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
“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.”
― Jane Austen
“Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.”
― Jane Austen
“I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.”
― Jane Austen
“Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.”
― Jane Austen
“What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.”
― Jane Austen
“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.”
― 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
“It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.”
― Jane Austen
“The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love.”
― Jane Austen
“Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”
― Jane Austen
“Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.”
― Jane Austen
“If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next.”
― Jane Austen
“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”
― 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
“They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.”
― Jane Austen
“To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.”
― Jane Austen
“One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.”
― Jane Austen
“Nobody minds having what is too good for them.”
― Jane Austen
“One man’s ways may be as good as another’s, but we all like our own best.”
― 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
“How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!”
― 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
“Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.”
― Jane Austen
“We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
― Jane Austen
“Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.”
― Jane Austen
“A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.”
― Jane Austen
“I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.”
― Jane Austen
“An artist cannot do anything slovenly.”
― Jane Austen
“Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
― Jane Austen
“I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
― Jane Austen
“It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.”
― Jane Austen
“We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.”
― Jane Austen
“For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?”
― Jane Austen
“Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.”
― Jane Austen
“A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.”
― 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
“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”
― Jane Austen
“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.”
― 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
“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
“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
“One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.”
― Jane Austen
“My sore throats are always worse than anyone’s.”
― Jane Austen
“There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry.”
― Jane Austen
“What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!”
― Jane Austen
“From politics, it was an easy step to silence.”
― Jane Austen
“To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.”
― 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
“In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.”
― Jane Austen
“A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”
― Jane Austen
“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”
― 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
“Those who do not complain are never pitied.”
― Jane Austen
“Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.”
― Jane Austen
“If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
― Jane Austen
“Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.”
― Jane Austen
“There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.”
― 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
“Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.”
― 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
“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.”
― Jane Austen
“Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”
― Jane Austen
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