Jane Austen Quotes

582 Sourced Quotes

The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance

Jane Austen
A sick child is always the mother's property; her own feelings generally make it so.

Jane Austen
Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation.

Jane Austen
I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.

Jane Austen
Nobody could catch cold by the sea; nobody wanted appetite by the sea; nobody wanted spirits; nobody wanted strength. Sea air was healing, softening, relaxing - fortifying and bracing - seemingly just as was wanted - sometimes one, sometimes the other. If the sea breeze failed, the seabath was the certain corrective; and where bathing disagreed, the sea air alone was evidently designed by nature for the cure.

Jane Austen
We must consider what Miss. Fairfax quits, before we condemn her taste for what she goes to.

Jane Austen
Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity.

Jane Austen
A persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.

Jane Austen
Young ladies should take care of themselves. Young ladies are delicate plants. They should take care of their health and their complexion. My dear, did you change your stockings?

Jane Austen
I wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.

Jane Austen
I will not adopt that ungenerous and impolitic custom so common with novel writers, of degrading by their contemptuous censure the very performances, to the number of which they are themselves adding?joining with their greatest enemies in bestowing the harshest epithets on such works, and scarcely ever permitting them to be read by their own heroine, who, if she accidentally take up a novel, is sure to turn over its insipid leaves with disgust.

Jane Austen
A Mr. (save, perhaps, some half dozen in the nation,) always needs a note of explanation.

Jane Austen
Undoubtedly... there is a meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. What bears affinity to cunning is despicable.

Jane Austen
People that marry can never part, but must go and keep house together. People that dance only stand opposite each other in a long room for half an hour.

Jane Austen
No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with.

Jane Austen
Strange things may be generally accounted for if their cause be fairly searched out.

Jane Austen
Give me but a little cheerful company, let me only have the company of the people I love, let me only be where I like and with whom I like, and the devil may take the rest, say I.

Jane Austen
Are no probabilities to be accepted, merely because they are not certainties?

Jane Austen
The post office has a great charm at one point of our lives. When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for.

Jane Austen
I am not born to sit still and do nothing. If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving for it.

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
Provided that nothing like useful knowledge could be gained from them, provided they were all story and no reflection, she had never any objection to books at all.

Jane Austen
I can safely say, that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.

Jane Austen
It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable.

Jane Austen
To take a dislike to a young man, only because he appeared to be of a different disposition from himself, was unworthy the real liberality of mind

Jane Austen
A man... must have a very good opinion of himself when he asks people to leave their own fireside, and encounter such a day as this, for the sake of coming to see him. He must think himself a most agreeable fellow.

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
Family connexions were always worth preserving, good company always worth seeking.

Jane Austen
I would rather have young people settle on a small income at once, and have to struggle with a few difficulties together, than be involved in a long engagement.

Jane Austen
But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]

Jane Austen