Jane Austen Quotes

I am quite honoured by your thinking me capable of drawing such a clergyman as you gave the sketch of in your note of Nov. 16th. But I assure you I am not. The comic part of the character I might be equal to, but not the good, the enthusiastic, the literary. Such a man's conversation must at times be on subjects of science and philosophy, of which I know nothing; or at least be occasionally abundant in quotations and allusions which a woman who, like me, knows only her own mother-tongue, and has read little in that, would be totally without the power of giving. A classical education, or at any rate a very extensive acquaintance with English literature, ancient and modern, appears to me quite indispensable for the person who would do any justice to your clergyman; and I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

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

How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!

"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett)

I cannot forget the follies and vices of others so soon as I ought, nor their offences against myself...My good opinion once lost is lost forever. - Fitzwilliam Darcy

I do not find it easy to talk to people I don't know.

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

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

If a book is well written, I always find it too short.

Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.

You deserve a longer letter than this; but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does.
And men take care that they should.

You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them.

If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony.