Jane Austen Quotes

Another stupid party last night; perhaps if larger they might be less intolerable, but here there were only just enough to make one card-table, with six people to look on and talk nonsense to each other.

Have a little compassion on my nerves. You tear them to pieces.

Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!

"There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome."
"And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody."
"And yours," he replied with a smile, "is wilfully to misunderstand them."

And sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.

"The last few hours were certainly very painful," replied Anne: "but when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure. One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering-"

He is a gentleman, and I am a gentleman's daughter. So far we are equal.

An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged: no harm can be done.

Men were put into the world to teach women the law of compromise.

She mediated, by turns, on broken promises and broken arches, phaetons and false hangings, Tilneys and trap-doors.

I do suspect that he is not really necessary to my happiness.

I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman's feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.

I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as they do it.

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