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

Experience Jane Austen's timeless wisdom in her unforgettable quotes. From love and friendship to society and human nature, Austen's words resonate across generations. Immerse yourself in her captivating world and be inspired by her wit and wisdom.

Jane Austen was an English novelist who is best known for her six novels, which offer a critique of the British landed gentry in the 18th century. Her works primarily explore the role of women in society and their reliance on marriage for social standing and financial security. Austen's novels, characterized by their social commentary, realism, and clever irony, have garnered praise from critics and scholars alike.

Although Austen's novels, such as Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma, were initially met with modest success during her lifetime, they did not bring her much fame. She also wrote two other novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, which were published posthumously in 1818. Additionally, she left behind several volumes of juvenile writings as well as an unfinished novel called Sanditon. However, after her death in 1817, her novels gained recognition when they were republished in Richard Bentley's Standard Novels series in 1833. Since then, Austen's works have enjoyed widespread acclaim and popularity among readers.

Austen's literary legacy extends beyond the written word. Her novels have served as inspiration for numerous critical essays and have been included in various literary anthologies. Moreover, her stories have been adapted into several films over the years, such as Pride and Prejudice (1940), Sense and Sensibility (1995), and Love & Friendship (2016). Despite her supposed uneventful life during her time, Jane Austen's insightful portrayal of societal expectations continues to captivate audiences even today.

✵ 16. December 1775 – 18. July 1817  •  Other names Jane Austenová
Jane Austen photo
Jane Austen: 477 quotes67 likes

Jane Austen Quotes

“Sophia shrieked and fainted on the ground—I screamed and instantly ran mad! We remained thus mutually deprived of our senses some minutes, and on regaining them were deprived of them again. For an hour and a quarter did we continue in this unfortunate situation.”

Jane Austen book Love and Freindship

Love and Friendship (1790)
Works, Love and Friendship

“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.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1801-01-08) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“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.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1801-01-03) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“By the bye, as I must leave off being young, I find many douceurs in being a sort of chaperon, for I am put on the sofa near the fire and can drink as much wine as I like.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1813-11-06) on ageing [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“We are to have a tiny party here tonight. I hate tiny parties, they force one into constant exertion.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1801-05-21) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It is not fair. He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people's mouths. I do not like him, and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Anna (1814-09-28) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I give you joy of our new nephew, and hope if he ever comes to be hanged it will not be till we are too old to care about it.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1811-04-25) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I am gratified by her having pleasure in what I write, but I wish the knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning criticism may not hurt my style, by inducing too great a solicitude. I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store-closet it would be charming.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1809-01-24) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“It was, perhaps, one of those cases in which advice is good or bad only as the event decides.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Persuasion (1817)
Works, Persuasion

“It would have amused you to see our progress. We went up by Sion Hill, and returned across the fields. In climbing a hill Mrs. Chamberlayne is very capital; I could with difficulty keep pace with her, yet would not flinch for the world. On plain ground I was quite her equal. And so we posted away under a fine hot sun, she without any parasol or any shade to her hat, stopping for nothing, and crossing the churchyard at Weston with as much expedition as if we were afraid of being buried alive.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1801-05-21) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I would recommend to her and Mr. D. the simple regimen of separate rooms.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1817-02-20) on Mrs. Deedes having an eighteenth child [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“You will have a great deal of unreserved discourse with Mrs. K., I dare say, upon this subject, as well as upon many other of our family matters. Abuse everybody but me.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1807-01-07) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I am afraid", replied Elinor, "that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.”

Jane Austen book Sense and Sensibility

Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Works, Sense and Sensibility

“Here I am once more in this scene of dissipation and vice, and I begin already to find my morals corrupted.”

Jane Austen

Letter (August 1796) on arriving in London [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“Let me know when you begin the new tea, and the new white wine. My present elegancies have not yet made me indifferent to such matters. I am still a cat if I see a mouse.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1813-09-23) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“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.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfield Park

“I wish I could finish stories as fast as you can. I am much obliged to you for the sight of Olivia, and think you have done for her very well; but the good-for-nothing father, who was the real author of all her faults and sufferings, should not escape unpunished. I hope he hung himself, or took the surname of Bone or underwent some direful penance or other.”

Jane Austen

Letter to niece Caroline (1814-12-06) regarding a story Caroline sent her [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“The Webbs are really gone! When I saw the waggons at the door, and thought of all the trouble they must have in moving, I began to reproach myself for not having liked them better, but since the waggons have disappeared my conscience has been closed again, and I am excessively glad they are gone.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Anna (1814-09-28) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“What should I do with your strong, manly, spirited sketches, full of variety and glow? How could I possibly join them on to the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces little effect after much labour?”

Jane Austen

Letter to J. Edward Austen (1816-12-16) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I cannot help hoping that many will feel themselves obliged to buy it. I shall not mind imagining it a disagreeable duty to them, so as they do it.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1813-11-06) on the reprint of Sense and Sensibility [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“Next week I shall begin my operations on my hat, on which you know my principal hopes of happiness depend.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1798-10-27) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“The General has got the gout, and Mrs. Maitland the jaundice. Miss Debary, Susan, and Sally, all in black, but without any stature, made their appearance, and I was as civil to them as their bad breath would allow me.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1800-11-20) on people she met at a ball [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I give you joy of having left Winchester. Now you may own how miserable you were there; now it will gradually all come out, your crimes and your miseries — how often you went up by the Mail to London and threw away fifty guineas at a tavern, and how often you were on the point of hanging yourself, restrained only, as some ill-natured aspersion upon poor old Winton has it, by the want of a tree within some miles of the city.”

Jane Austen

Letter to J. Edward Austen (1816-12-16) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I am very much obliged to my dear little George for his message - for his love at least; his duty, I suppose, was only in consequence of some hint of my favourable intentions towards him from his father or mother. I am sincerely rejoiced, however, that I ever was born, since it has been the means of procuring him a dish of tea.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1798-12-18) about her nephew George [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire.”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey (1817)
Works, Northanger Abbey

“I cannot anyhow continue to find people agreeable; I respect Mrs. Chamberlayne for doing her hair well, but cannot feel a more tender sentiment. Miss Langley is like any other short girl, with a broad nose and wide mouth, fashionable dress and exposed bosom. Adm. Stanhope is a gentleman-like man, but then his legs are too short and his tail too long.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1801-05-12) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I can recollect nothing more to say at present; perhaps breakfast may assist my ideas. I was deceived — my breakfast supplied only two ideas — that the rolls were good and the butter bad.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1799-06-19) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I could no more write a romance than an epic poem. I could not sit seriously down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life; and if it were indispensable for me to keep it up and never relax into laughing at myself or other people, I am sure I should be hung before I had finished the first chapter. No, I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Mr. Clarke (1816-04-01) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“A very short trial convinced her that a curricle was the prettiest equipage in the world”

Jane Austen book Northanger Abbey

Northanger Abbey (1817)
Works, Northanger Abbey

“In Paragon we met Mrs. Foley and Mrs. Dowdeswell with her yellow shawl airing out, and at the bottom of Kingsdown Hill we met a gentleman in a buggy, who, on minute examination, turned out to be Dr. Hall — and Dr. Hall in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1799-06-17) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“There are such beings in the world — perhaps one in a thousand — as the creature you and I should think perfection; where grace and spirit are united to worth, where the manners are equal to the heart and understanding; but such a person may not come in your way, or, if he does, he may not be the eldest son of a man of fortune, the near relation of your particular friend, and belonging to your own county.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Fanny Knight (1814-11-18) on finding love [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“Devereux Forester's being ruined by his vanity is extremely good, but I wish you would not let him plunge into a "vortex of dissipation." I do not object to the thing, but I cannot bear the expression; it is such thorough novel slang, and so old that I daresay Adam met with it in the first novel he opened.”

Jane Austen

Letter to niece Anna (1814-09-28) regarding a character in Anna's novel [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1808-06-15) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“There were several Battles between the Yorkists and the Lancastrians, in which the former (as they ought) usually won.”

Jane Austen

'The History of England (1791)
Works, History of England

“I believe I drank too much wine last night at Hurstbourne; I know not how else to account for the shaking of my hand today. You will kindly make allowance therefore for any indistinctness of writing, by attributing it to this venial error.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1800-11-20) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“Mrs. B. and two young women were of the same party, except when Mrs. B. thought herself obliged to leave them to run round the room after her drunken husband. His avoidance, and her pursuit, with the probable intoxication of both, was an amusing scene.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1801-05-12) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I had a very pleasant evening, however, though you will probably find out that there was no particular reason for it; but I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.”

Jane Austen

Letter (1799-01-21) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“She [Mary I] married Philip King of Spain, who in her sister's reign, was famous for building Armadas.”

Jane Austen

'The History of England (1791)
Works, History of England

“Of various admirals I could tell you a great deal: of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But, in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. Certainly, my home at my uncle’s brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfield Park

“I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit.”

Jane Austen

Letter to Cassandra (1799-06-11) on decorating her hat [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“My head-dress was a bugle-band like the border to my gown, and a flower of Mrs Tilson’s. I depended upon hearing something of the evening from Mr. W. K., and am very well satisfied with his notice of me — "A pleasing looking young woman" — that must do; one cannot pretend to anything better now; thankful to have it continued a few years longer!”

Jane Austen

Letter (1811-04-30) [Letters of Jane Austen -- Brabourne Edition]
Letters

“I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfield Park

“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…”

Jane Austen book Mansfield Park

Mansfield Park (1814)
Works, Mansfield Park

“It was in this reign that Joan of Arc reigned and made such a row among the English.”

Jane Austen

'The History of England (1791)
Works, History of England

“Jane Austen is thus a mistress of much deeper emotion than appears upon the surface. She stimulates us to supply what is not there. What she offers is, apparently, a trifle, yet is composed of something that expands in the reader’s mind and endows with the most enduring form of life scenes which are outwardly trivial. Always the stress is laid upon character. How, we are made to wonder, will Emma behave when Lord Osborne and Tom Musgrave make their call at five minutes before three, just as Mary is bringing in the tray and the knife-case? It is an extremely awkward situation. The young men are accustomed to much greater refinement. Emma may prove herself ill-bred, vulgar, a nonentity. The turns and twists of the dialogue keep us on the tenterhooks of suspense. Our attention is half upon the present moment, half upon the future. And when, in the end, Emma behaves in such a way as to vindicate our highest hopes of her, we are moved as if we had been made witnesses of a matter of the highest importance. Here, indeed, in this unfinished and in the main inferior story, are all the elements of Jane Austen’s greatness. It has the permanent quality of literature. Think away the surface animation, the likeness to life, and there remains, to provide a deeper pleasure, an exquisite discrimination of human values.”

Jane Austen

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1925)

“Charlotte Brontë, with all her splendid gift for prose, stumbled and fell with that clumsy weapon in her hands. George Eliot committed atrocities with it that beggar description. Jane Austen looked at it and laughed at it and devised a perfectly natural, shapely sentence proper for her own use and never departed from it. Thus, with less genius for writing than Charlotte Brontë, she got infinitely more said.”

Jane Austen

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (1929), Chapter 4

“Most works in realism tell a succession of such abject truths; they are deeply in earnest, every detail is true, and yet the whole finally tumbles to the ground — true but without significance. How did Jane Austen save her novels from that danger? They appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, with R. Crusoe, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Elliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. The art is so consummate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done.”

Jane Austen

Thornton Wilder, A preface for Our Town (1938)

“Miss Austen was surely a great novelist. What she did, she did perfectly. Her work, as far as it goes, is faultless. She wrote of the times in which she lived, of the class of people with which she associated, and in the language which was usual to her as an educated lady. Of romance, -- what we generally mean when we speak of romance -- she had no tinge. Heroes and heroines with wonderful adventures there are none in her novels. Of great criminals and hidden crimes she tells us nothing. But she places us in a circle of gentlemen and ladies, and charms us while she tells us with an unconscious accuracy how men should act to women, and women act to men. It is not that her people are all good; -- and, certainly, they are not all wise. The faults of some are the anvils on which the virtues of others are hammered till they are bright as steel. In the comedy of folly I know no novelist who has beaten her. The letters of Mr. Collins, a clergyman in Pride and Prejudice, would move laughter in a low-church archbishop.”

Jane Austen

Anthony Trollope, Lecture (1870)

“Every housemaid expects at least once a week as much excitement as would have lasted a Jane Austen heroine throughout a whole novel.”

Jane Austen

Bertrand Russell, in The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Ch. 4: Boredom and excitement

“When I was young, it was not thought proper for young ladies to study very conspicuously; and especially with pen in hand. Young ladies (at least in provincial towns) were expected to sit down in the parlour to sew,—during which reading aloud was permitted,—or to practice their music; but so as to be fit to receive callers, without any signs of blue‐stockingism which could be reported abroad. Jane Austen herself, the Queen of novelists, the immortal creator of Anne Elliott, Mr. Knightly, and a score or two more of unrivalled intimate friends of the whole public, was compelled by the feelings of her family to cover up her manuscripts with a large piece of muslin work, kept on the table for the purpose, whenever any genteel people came in. So it was with other young ladies, for some time after Jane Austen was in her grave; and thus my first studies in philosophy were carried on with great care and reserve.”

Jane Austen

Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography, vol. 1 [1855]