Jane Austen Quotes

582 Sourced Quotes

A single woman with a narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman of fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.

Jane Austen
I am now convinced that I have never been much in love; for had I really experienced that pure and elevating passion, I should at present detest his very name, and wish him all manner of evil. But my feelings are not only cordial towards him; they are even impartial towards her. I cannot find out that I hate her at all, or that I am in the least unwilling to think her a very good sort of girl. There can be no love in all this.

Jane Austen
She was happy, she knew she was happy, and knew she ought to be happy.

Jane Austen
But Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is a part of an Englishman's constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them everywhere; one is intimate with him by instinct. No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.

Jane Austen
Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted.

Jane Austen
I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.

Jane Austen
May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?

Jane Austen
Nay," cried Bingley, "this is too much, to remember at night all the foolish things that were said in the morning.

Jane Austen
How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!

Jane Austen
Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation.

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

Jane Austen
She looked back as well as she could; but it was all confusion. She had taken up the idea, she supposed and made everything bend to it.

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
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
But remember that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by everybody at times, whatever be their education or state. Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience; or give it a more fascinating name: call it hope.

Jane Austen
What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?

Jane Austen
I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention.
On history

Jane Austen
Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing, where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everything open?

Jane Austen
I am sure of this, that if everybody was to drink their bottle a day, there would be not half the disorders in the world there are now. It would be a famous good thing for us all.

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

Jane Austen
My dear Mr. Bennet," said his lady to him one day, "have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?

Jane Austen
Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable…one false step involves her in endless ruin.

Jane Austen
My object then," replied Darcy, "was to show you, by every civility in my power, that I was not so mean as to resent the past; and I hoped to obtain your forgiveness, to lessen your ill opinion, by letting you see that your reproofs had been attended to. How soon any other wishes introduced themselves I can hardly tell, but I believe in about half an hour after I had seen you.

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 younger brother must help to pay for the pleasures of the elder.

Jane Austen
I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.

Jane Austen
Never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's...

Jane Austen
Selfishness must always be forgiven, you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

Jane Austen
Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims.

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

Jane Austen