Jane Austen Quotes
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I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.
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Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.
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You are very kind in planning presents for me to make, and my mother has shown me exactly the same attention; but as I do not choose to have generosity dictated to me, I shall not resolve on giving my cabinet to Anna till the first thought of it has been my own.
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I trust that absolutes have gradations.
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I am sorry to tell you that I am getting very extravagant, and spending all my money, and, what is worse for you, I have been spending yours too.
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If a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavour to conceal it, he must find it out."
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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.
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I believe you [men] capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as - if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one, you need not covet it) is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.
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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.]
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None but a woman can teach the science of herself.
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In a letter from Bath to her sister, Cassandra, one senses her frustration at her sheltered existence, Tuesday, 12 May 1801. Another stupid party . . . with six people to look on, and talk nonsense to each other.
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There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.
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'I am afraid', replied Elinor, 'that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.'
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It is a lovely night, and they are much to be pitied who have not been taught to feel, in some degree, as you do; who have not, at least, been given a taste for Nature in early life. They lose a great deal.
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Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.
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How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!
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Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
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He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again.
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Such a letter was not to be soon recovered from. . . . Every moment rather brought fresh agitation. It was an overpowering happiness.
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There were several Battles between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, in which the former (as they ought) usually won.
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Marianne was silent; it was impossible for her to say what she did not feel, however trivial the occasion.
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I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.
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She was of course only too good for him; but as nobody minds having what is too good for them, he was very steadily earnest in the pursuit of the blessing...
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Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame.