Quotes by Jane Austin

I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.

To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.

Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?

Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
(Emma)

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
(Mansfield Park)

Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.
(Mansfield Park)

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.
(Mansfield Park)

I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
(Mansfield Park)

If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
(Mansfield Park)

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
(Mansfield Park)

Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.
(Mansfield Park)1

Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
(Mansfield Park)

One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.
(Mansfield Park)

The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.
(Mansfield Park)

There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.
(Mansfield Park)

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
(Mansfield Park)

Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or...of something else.
(Mansfield Park)

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.
(Northanger Abbey, 1818)

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
(Northanger Abbey, 1818)

In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.
(Northanger Abbey, 1818)