Quotes By Jane Austen

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

It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

Oh! do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.

To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.

Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.

In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.

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

Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.

My sore throats are always worse than anyone's.

Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.

My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

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

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.

For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.

A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.