Jane Austen Quotes

582 Sourced Quotes

Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman on receiving the assurance of that affection of which she has scarcely allowed herself to entertain a hope.

Jane Austen
Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame.

Jane Austen
Lovely & too charming Fair one, notwithstanding your forbidding Squint, your greazy tresses & your swelling Back, which are more frightful than imagination can paint or pen describe, I cannot refrain from expressing my raptures, at the engaging Qualities of your Mind, which so amply atone for the Horror, with which your first appearance must ever inspire the unwary visitor.

Jane Austen
If I was wrong in yielding to persuasion once, remember that it was to persuasion exerted on the side of safety, not of risk. When I yielded, I thought it was to duty; but no duty could be called in aid here. In marrying a man indifferent to me, all risk would have been incurred and all duty violated.

Jane Austen
About thirty years ago, Miss Maria Ward of Huntingdon, with only seven thousand pounds, had the good luck to captivate Sir Thomas Bertram, of Mansfield Park, in the county of Northampton, and to be thereby raised to the rank of a baronet's lady, with all the comforts and consequences of an handsome house and large income.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jane Austen