Top 500 Jane Austen Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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.”

— Jane Austen

402. “The mere habit of learning to love is the thing; and a teachableness of disposition in a young lady is a great blessing.”

— Jane Austen

403. “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

404. “One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s.”

— Jane Austen

405. “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.”

— Jane Austen

406. “Men of sense, whatever you may choose to say, do not want silly wives.”

— Jane Austen

407. “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.”

— Jane Austen

408. “The indirect boast; for you are really proud of your defects in writing, because you consider them as proceeding from a rapidity of thought and carelessness of execution, which, if not estimable, you think at least highly interesting. The power of doing anything with quickness is always prized much by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance.”

— Jane Austen

409. “No: the years which had destroyed her youth and bloom had only given him a more glowing, manly, open look, in no respect lessening his personal advantages. She had seen the same Frederick Wentworth.”

— Jane Austen

410. “A persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character.”

— Jane Austen

411. “We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us.”

— Jane Austen

412. “Pray, pray be composed, and do not betray what you feel to every body present.”

— Jane Austen

413. “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.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

415. “A Woman never looks better than on horseback.”

— Jane Austen

416. “No- I cannot talk of books in a ballroom; my head is always full of something else.”

— Jane Austen

417. “To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”

— Jane Austen

418. “But if I were you, I would stand by the nephew. He has more to give.”

— Jane Austen

419. “Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.”

— Jane Austen

420. “She knew that what Marianne and her mother conjectured one moment, they believed the next: that with them, to wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.”

— Jane Austen

421. “Such squeamish youths as cannot bear to be connected with a little absurdity are not worth a regret.”

— Jane Austen

422. “Respect for right conduct is felt by every body.”

— Jane Austen

423. “What do you know of my heart? What do you know of anything but your own suffering?”

— Jane Austen

424. “If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy.”

— Jane Austen

425. “She was nothing more than a mere good-tempered, civil and obliging Young Woman; as such we could scarcely dislike her – she was only an Object of Contempt.”

— Jane Austen

426. “I am no indiscriminate novel reader. The mere trash of the common circulating library I hold in the highest contempt.”

— Jane Austen

427. “Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

— Jane Austen

428. “She will never submit to any thing requiring industry and patience, and a subjection of the fancy to the understanding.”

— Jane Austen

429. “I have changed my mind, and changed the trimmings of my cap this morning; they are now such as you suggested.”

— Jane Austen

430. “As a brother, a landlord, a master, she considered how many people’s happiness were in his guardianship! – How much of pleasure or pain it was in his power to bestow! – How much of good or evil must be done by him!”

— Jane Austen

431. “When money is once parted with, it can never return.”

— Jane Austen

432. “She is probably by this time as tired of me, as I am of her; but as she is too Polite and I am too civil to say so, our letters are still as frequent and affectionate as ever, and our Attachment as firm and sincere as when it first commenced.”

— Jane Austen

433. “There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow. Employment, even melancholy, may dispel melancholy.”

— Jane Austen

434. “And if I had not a letter to write myself, I might sit by you and admire the evenness of your writing, as another young lady once did. But I have an aunt too, who must not be longer neglected.”

— Jane Austen

435. “Yes, I found myself, by insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her; and the happiest hours of my life were what I spent with her.”

— Jane Austen

436. “I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.”

— Jane Austen

437. “And to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”

— Jane Austen

438. “I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principle duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or to marry them selves, have no business with the partners or wives of the neighbors.”

— Jane Austen

439. “We met Dr. Hall in such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.”

— Jane Austen

440. “I have no pretensions whatever to that kind of elegance which consists in tormenting a respectable man.”

— Jane Austen

441. “I do regard her as one who is too modest for the world in general to be aware of half her accomplishments, and too highly accomplished for modesty to be natural of any other woman.”

— Jane Austen

442. “Give me but a little cheerful company, let me only have the company of the people I love, let me only be where I like and with whom I like, and the devil may take the rest, say I.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

444. “The power of doing any thing with quickness is always much prized by the possessor, and often without any attention to the imperfection of the performance. – Mr Darcy.”

— Jane Austen

445. “You have delighted us long enough.”

— Jane Austen

446. “Arguments are too much like disputes.”

— Jane Austen

447. “If the heroine of one novel be not patronized by the heroine of another, from whom can she expect protection and regard?”

— Jane Austen

448. “Mrs. Jennings was a widow, with an ample jointure. She had only two daughters, both of whom she had lived to see respectably married, and she had now therefore nothing to do but to marry all the rest of the world.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

450. “Everybody’s heart is open, you know, when they have recently escaped from severe pain, or are recovering the blessing of health.”

— Jane Austen