Top 500 Jane Austen Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “I leave it to be settled, by whomsoever it may concern, whether the tendency of this work be altogether to recommend parental tyranny, or reward filial disobedience.”

— Jane Austen

252. “No young lady can be justified in falling in love before the gentleman’s love is declared, it must be very improper that a young lady should dream of a gentleman before the gentleman is first known to have dreamt of her.”

— Jane Austen

253. “Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle.”

— Jane Austen

254. “If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite as leisure.”

— Jane Austen

255. “She is loveliness itself.”

— Jane Austen

256. “The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient-at others so bewildered and weak-and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control!”

— Jane Austen

257. “She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man.”

— Jane Austen

258. “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.”

— Jane Austen

259. “There is not the hundredth part of the wine consumed in this kingdom that there ought to be. Our foggy climate wants help.”

— Jane Austen

260. “It was a gloomy prospect, and all that she could do was to throw a mist over it, and hope when the mist cleared away, she should see something else.”

— Jane Austen

261. “To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.”

— Jane Austen

262. “There is one thing, Emma, which a man can always do if he chooses, and that is his duty; not by manoeuvring and finessing, but by vigour and resolution. – Mr. Knightley.”

— Jane Austen

263. “In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better show more affection than she feels.”

— Jane Austen

264. “Anne hoped she had outlived the age of blushing; but the age of emotion she certainly had not.”

— Jane Austen

265. “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?”

— Jane Austen

266. “It sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before.”

— Jane Austen

267. “I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.”

— Jane Austen

268. “Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.”

— Jane Austen

269. “Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant.”

— Jane Austen

270. “At my time of life opinions are tolerably fixed. It is not likely that I should now see or hear anything to change them.”

— Jane Austen

271. “One can never have too large a party.”

— Jane Austen

272. “I have had to contend against the unkindness of his sister, and the insolence of his mother; and have suffered the punishment of an attachment, without enjoying its advantages.”

— Jane Austen

273. “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.”

— Jane Austen

274. “She has many rare and charming qualities, but Sobriety is not one of them.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

276. “There certainly was some great mismanagement in the education of those two young men. One has got all the goodness, and the other all the appearance of it.”

— Jane Austen

277. “It is a difference of opinion which does not admit of proof. We each begin probably with a little bias towards our own sex, and upon that bias build every circumstance in favour of it which has occurred within our own circle;.”

— Jane Austen

278. “Mr. Knightley seemed to be trying not to smile; and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs. Elton’s beginning to talk to him.”

— Jane Austen

279. “None but a woman can teach the science of herself.”

— Jane Austen

280. “There could have never been two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.”

— Jane Austen

281. “I know I shall probably never see him again, but I cannot bear to think that he is alive in the world and thinking ill of me.”

— Jane Austen

282. “I am all astonishment.”

— Jane Austen

283. “From a night of more sleep than she had expected, Marianne awoke the next morning to the same consciousness of misery in which she had closed her eyes.”

— Jane Austen

284. “Your countenance perfectly informs me that you were in company last night with the person, whom you think the most agreeable in the world, the person who interests you at this present time, more than all the rest of the world put together.”

— Jane Austen

285. “I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.”

— Jane Austen

286. “You may ask questions which I shall not choose to answer.”

— Jane Austen

287. “Let no one presume to give the feelings of a young woman on receiving the assurance of that affection of which she has scarcely allowed herself to entertain a hope.”

— Jane Austen

288. “I trust that absolutes have gradations.”

— Jane Austen

289. “Everybody has their taste in noises as well as in other matters; and sounds are quite innoxious, or most distressing, by their sort rather than their quantity.”

— Jane Austen

290. “Deceived in Freindship and Betrayed in Love.”

— Jane Austen

291. “Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world.”

— Jane Austen

292. “There, he had seen every thing to exalt in his estimation the woman he had lost, and there begun to deplore the pride, the folly, the madness of resentment, which had kept him from trying to regain her when thrown in his way.”

— Jane Austen

293. “A very narrow income has a tendency to contract the mind, and sour the temper. Those who can barely live, and who live perforce in a very small, and generally very inferior, society, may well be illiberal and cross.”

— Jane Austen

294. “This was a lucky recollection – it saved her from something like regret.”

— Jane Austen

295. “She was feeling, thinking, trembling about everything; agitated, happy, miserable, infinitely obliged, absolutely angry.”

— Jane Austen

296. “How wonderful, how very wonderful the operations of time, and the changes of the human mind!”

— Jane Austen

297. “A report of a most alarming nature reached me two days ago.”

— Jane Austen

298. “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.”

— Jane Austen

299. “I am certainly the most fortunate creature ever existed!”

— Jane Austen

300. “We are so vain that we even care for the opinion of those we don’t care for.”

— Jane Austen