Jane Austen Quotes
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You think me foolish to call instruction a torment, but if you had been as much used as myself to hear poor little children first learning their letters and then learning to spell, if you had ever seen how stupid they can be for a whole morning together, and how tired my poor mother is at the end of it, as I am in the habit of seeing almost every day of my life at home, you would allow that to torment and to instruct might sometimes be used as synonymous words.
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What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?
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I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.
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Told herself likewise not to hope. But it was too late. Hope had already entered.
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Pray, pray be composed, and do not betray what you feel to every body present...
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If you were to give me forty such men, I never could be so happy as you. Till I have your disposition, your goodness, I never can have your happiness. No, no, let me shift for myself; and, perhaps, if I have very good luck, I may meet with another Mr. Collins in time.
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What are men to rocks and mountains?
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I . . . am always half afraid of finding a clever novel too clever--& of finding my own story & my own people all forestalled.
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Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply.
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Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth.
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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.
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Every moment had its pleasure and its hope.
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Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.
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And have you never known the pleasure and triumph of a lucky guess? I pity you. I thought you cleverer; for depend upon it, a lucky guess is never merely luck. There is always some talent in it.
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I do not find myself making any use of the word sacrifice.
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She went, however, and they sauntered about together many a half hour in Mr. Grant's shrubbery, the weather being unusually mild for the time of year, and venturing sometimes even to sit down on one of the benches now comparatively unsheltered, remaining there perhaps till, in the midst of some tender ejaculation of Fanny's on the sweets of so protracted an autumn, they were forced by the sudden swell of a cold gust shaking down the last few yellow leaves about them, to jump up and walk for warmth.
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I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.
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Till this moment I never knew myself.
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If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.
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And you are never to stir out of doors till you can prove that you have spent ten minutes of every day in a rational manner.
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They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.
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Men were put into the world to teach women the law of compromise.
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Facts or opinions which are to pass through the hands of so many, to be misconceived by folly in one, and ignorance in another, can hardly have much truth left.
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And what am I to do on the occasion? -- It seems an hopeless business.