Jane Austen Quotes

“I can recollect nothing more to say at present; perhaps breakfast may assist my ideas. I was deceived -- my breakfast supplied only two ideas -- that the rolls were good and the butter bad.”

“Mrs. Jennings was a widow, with an ample jointure. She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and she had now therefore nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world.”

“Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of the mouths of other people.”

“His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.”

“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.”

“Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.”

“It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.”

“Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.”

“I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!- Elizabeth Bennet”

“Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common.”

“I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice.”

“I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control.”

“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)”

“If gratitude and esteem are good foundations of affection, Elizabeth's change of sentiment will be neither improbable nor faulty. But if otherwise--if regard springing from such sources is unreasonable or unnatural, in comparison of what is so often described as arising on a first interview with its object, and even before two words have been exchanged, nothing can be said in her defence, except that she had given somewhat of a trial to the latter method in her partiality for Wickham, and that its ill success might, perhaps, authorise her to seek the other less interesting mode of attachment.”

“Eleanor went to her room "where she was free to think and be wretched.”

“But indeed I would rather have nothing but tea.”

“One word from you shall silence me forever.”

“Her pleasure in the walk must arise from the exercise and the day, from the view of the last smiles of the year upon the tawny leaves and withered hedges, and from repeating to herself some few of the thousand poetical descriptions extant of autumn-that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness-that season which has drawn from every poet worthy of being read some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.”

“Family connexions were always worth preserving, good company always worth seeking.”

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

“With women, the heart argues, not the mind.”

“The power of doing any thing with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance. - Mr Darcy”

“Almost anything is possible with time”

“I certainly must,' said she. 'This sensation of listlessness, weariness, stupidity, this disinclination to sit down and employ myself, this feeling of everything's being dull and insipid about the house! I must be in love; I should be the oddest creature in the world if I were not.”

“A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”