Quotes from Jane Austen

None but a woman can teach the science of herself.

Mr. Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile; and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs. Elton's beginning to talk to him.

And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody." "And yours," he replied with a smile, "is willfully to misunderstand them.

I go too long without picking up a good book, I feel like I've done nothing useful with my life.

They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.

But are they all horrid, are you sure they are all horrid? [Referring to Gothic novels, fashionable in England at the beginning of the 19th century, but frowned upon in polite society.]

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

I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.

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.

It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.

Here and there, human nature may be great in times of trial, but generally speaking it is its weakness and not its strength that appears in a sick chamber.

Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.

What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering?

it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.

At my time of life opinions are tolerably fixed. It is not likely that I should now see or hear anything to change them.

The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.

One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.

Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.

A single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid - the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.

Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.

There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.

Those who do not complain are never pitied.

A man who has nothing to do with his own time has no conscience in his intrusion on that of others.