Jane Austen - Northanger Abbey (1817)

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Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has a good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will pa tronize in vain,--which taste cannot tolerate,--which ridicule will seize.

Jane Austen
If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.

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
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
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
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
I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principle duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or to marry them selves, have no business with the partners or wives of the neighbors.

Jane Austen
To be claimed as a good, though in an improper style, is at least better than being rejected as no good at all.

Jane Austen
Good company requires only birth, education, and manners, and with regard to education is not very nice. Birth and good manners are essential; but a little learning is by no means a dangerous thing in good company; on the contrary, it will do very well.

Jane Austen
It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle;

Jane Austen
An agreeable manner may set off handsome features, but can never alter plain ones.

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

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

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

Jane Austen