Jane Austen Quotes

My good opinion once lost is lost forever.

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

We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him.

If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.

Her heart did whisper that he had done it for her.

"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."

There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison

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.

A girl likes to be crossed a little in love now and then.
It is something to think of

The distance is nothing when one has a motive.

"I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men."

"Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. 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."

I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.

Nothing ever fatigues me, but doing what I do not like.

Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.