Top 500 Jane Austen Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “I will not say that your mulberry trees are dead; but I am afraid they’re not alive.”

— Jane Austen

352. “Far be it from me, my dear sister, to depreciate such pleasures. They would doubtless be congenial with the generality of female minds. But I confess they would have no charms for me. I should infinitely prefer a book.”

— Jane Austen

353. “How little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue.”

— Jane Austen

354. “Well, my comfort is, I am sure Jane will die of a broken heart, and then he will be sorry for what he has done.”

— Jane Austen

355. “To be sure you know no actual good of me, but nobody thinks of that when they fall in love.”

— Jane Austen

356. “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.”

— Jane Austen

357. “She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older: the natural sequel of an unnatural beginning.”

— Jane Austen

358. “What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.”

— Jane Austen

359. “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 Storecloset it would be charming.”

— Jane Austen

360. “Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.”

— Jane Austen

361. “One cannot fix one’s eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

363. “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.”

— Jane Austen

364. “Marianne Dashwood was born to an extraordinary fate. She was born to discover the falsehood of her own opinions, and to counteract, by her conduct, her most favourite maxims.”

— Jane Austen

365. “We are told to “despair of nothing we would attain,” as “unwearied diligence our point would gain.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

367. “A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.”

— Jane Austen

368. “Did not you? I did for you. But that is one great difference between us. Compliments always take you by surprise, and me never.”

— Jane Austen

369. “Whatever bears affinity to cunning is despicable.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

371. “To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.”

— Jane Austen

372. “One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

374. “An agreeable manner may set off handsome features, but can never alter plain ones.”

— Jane Austen

375. “What praise is more valuable than the praise of an intelligent servant?”

— Jane Austen

376. “I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.”

— Jane Austen

377. “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.”

— Jane Austen

378. “It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?”

— Jane Austen

379. “The post office has a great charm at one point of our lives. When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for.”

— Jane Austen

380. “You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at.”

— Jane Austen

381. “Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.”

— Jane Austen

382. “Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly.”

— Jane Austen

383. “General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.”

— Jane Austen

384. “One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it, unless it has been all suffering, nothing but suffering.”

— Jane Austen

385. “Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”

— Jane Austen

386. “A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world.”

— Jane Austen

387. “If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow.”

— Jane Austen

388. “From all that I can collect by your manner of talking, you must be two of the silliest girls in the country. I have suspected it some time, but I am now convinced.”

— Jane Austen

389. “A single woman with a narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid, the proper sport of boys and girls, but a single woman of fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.”

— Jane Austen

390. “They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.”

— Jane Austen

391. “I do not think it worth while to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it.”

— Jane Austen

392. “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.”

— Jane Austen

393. “It is not everyone,? said Elinor, ’who has your passion for dead leaves.”

— Jane Austen

394. “A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from; and he who can do it, where there is no doubt of her regard, must, I think, be the happiest of mortals.”

— Jane Austen

395. “They gave themselves up wholly to their sorrow, seeking increase of wretchedness in every reflection that could afford it, and resolved against ever admitting consolation in future.”

— Jane Austen

396. “When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.”

— Jane Austen

397. “Are the shades of Pemberley to be thus polluted?”

— Jane Austen

398. “He then departed, to make himself still more interesting, in the midst of a heavy rain.”

— Jane Austen

399. “Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.”

— Jane Austen

400. “That is what I like; that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue.”

— Jane Austen