Jane Austen Quotes page 4 477 Quotes of Timeless Wisdom, Love, Friendship, Society, and Human Nature

“Is not general incivility the very essence of love?”

Source: Persuasion

“What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps one in a continual state of inelegance.”

Variant: Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?
Source: Pride and Prejudice

“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.”

Letter (1796-09-18) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.”

Source: Sense and Sensibility

“… why did we wait for any thing? — why not seize the pleasure at once? — How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!”

Source: Sense and Sensibility

“Mr. Darcy began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention.”

Source: Emma (1815)

“Eleanor went to her room "where she was free to think and be wretched.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“If there is any thing disagreeable going on, men are always sure to get out of it.”

Source: Sense and Sensibility

“I never wish to offend, but I am so foolishly shy, that I often seem negligent, when I am only kept back by my natural awkwardness."

-Edward Ferrars”

Source: Persuasion

“That will do extremely well, child. You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.”

Source: Sense and Sensibility

“They parted at last with mutual civility, and possibly a mutual desire of never meeting again.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“I am not at all in a humor for writing; I must write on till I am.”

“We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.”

“She told the story, however, with great spirit among her friends; for she had a lively, playful disposition, which delighted in any thing ridiculous.”

Source: Persuasion

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“To her own heart it was a delightful affair, to her imagination it was even a ridiculous one, but to her reason, her judgment, it was completely a puzzle.”

Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfield Park

“But indeed I would rather have nothing but tea.”

Source: Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay

“She had a lively, playful disposition that delighted in anything ridiculous.”

Source: Mansfield Park

“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.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“She felt that she could so much more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose tongue never slipped.”

Source: Persuasion

“Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of any body else.”

Source: Persuasion

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

“Obstinate, headstrong girl!”

“If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“What a shame, for I dearly love to laugh.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Now I must give one smirk and then we may be rational again”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

“We are each of an unsocial, taciturn disposition, unwilling to speak, unless we expect to say something that will amaze the whole room, and be handed down to posterity with all the eclat of a proverb.”

“Life could do nothing for her, beyond giving time for a better preparation for death.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Elizabeth had never been more at a loss to make her feelings appear what they were not. It was necessary to laugh, when she would rather have cried.”

Source: Sense and Sensibility

“But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Elinor could sit still no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease.”

Source: Northanger Abbey: a play in two acts, based upon the novel

“I have not wanted syllables where actions have spoken so plainly.”

Source: Sense and Sensibility

“I cannot comprehend the neglect of a family library in such days as these."
- Mr. Darcy”

Source: Sense and Sensibility

“This sweetest and best of all creatures, faultless in spite of all her faults.”

Source: Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Persuasion

“It is not every man's fate to marry the woman who loves him best”

Source: Emma

“I am not fond of the idea of my shrubberies being always approachable.”

Source: Emma

Source: Persuasion

“to hope was to expect”

“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.”

Variant: To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect
Source: Sense and Sensibility

“I walk: I prefer walking.”

“I will only add, God bless you.”

Source: Persuasion

“I certainly have not the talent which some people possess, of conversing easily with those I have never seen before.”

“A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book!”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“You have bewitched me body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. And wish from this day forth never to be parted from you.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“Fanny! You are killing me!"
"No man dies of love but on the stage, Mr. Crawford.”

“I have been meditating on the very great pleasure which a pair of fine eyes in the face of a pretty woman can bestow.”

Source: Mansfield Park

“Miss Morland, no one can think more highly of the understanding of women than I do. In my opinion, nature has given them so much, that they never find it necessary to use more than half.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Source: Northanger Abbey

“You were disgusted with the women who were always speaking and looking, and thinking for your approbation alone. I roused, and interested you, because I was so unlike them.”

“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”

Source: Pride and Prejudice

“I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like”

Source: Mansfield Park