Jane Austen - Persuasion (1816)

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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
But there are some situations of the human mind in which good sense has very little power...

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

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

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
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
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
Yet there it was not love. It was a little fever of admiration; but it might, probably must, end in love with some

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
The one claim I shall make for my own sex is that we love longest, when all hope is gone.

Jane Austen
She had nothing to do but to forgive herself and be happier than ever…

Jane Austen
I cannot make speeches, Emma...If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am. You hear nothing but truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.

Jane Austen
Brandon is just the kind of man whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.

Jane Austen
Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of any body else.

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
She ventured to hope he did not always read only poetry; and to say, that she thought it was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.

Jane Austen
Woe betide him, and her too, when it comes to things of consequence, when they are placed in circumstances requiring fortitude and strength of mind, if she have not resolution enough to resist idle interference... It is the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a character, that no influence over it can be depended on. You are never sure of a good impression being durable; everybody may sway it. Let those who would be happy be firm.

Jane Austen
Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.

Jane Austen
Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from.... Every moment rather brought fresh agitation. It was an overpowering happiness.

Jane Austen
I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.

Jane Austen
What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.

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, he had seen every thing to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way.

Jane Austen
She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.

Jane Austen
There is not the hundredth part of the wine consumed in this kingdom that there ought to be. Our foggy climate wants help.

Jane Austen
Half the sum of attraction, on either side, might have been enough, for he had nothing to do, and she had hardly any body to love." (of Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth, Persuasion)

Jane Austen
Every young lady may feel for my heroine in this critical moment, for every young lady has at some time or other known the same agitation.

Jane Austen
What wild imaginations one forms where dear self is concerned! How sure to be mistaken!

Jane Austen