Top 500 Jane Austen Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “Men of sense, whatever you may choose to say, do not want silly wives.”

— Jane Austen

402. “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

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. “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

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

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

— Jane Austen

412. “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

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

— Jane Austen

414. “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

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

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

417. “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

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

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

421. “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

422. “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

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

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

426. “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

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

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

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

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

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

433. “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

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

— Jane Austen

435. “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

436. “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

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

— Jane Austen

438. “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

439. “You have delighted us long enough.”

— Jane Austen

440. “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

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

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

— Jane Austen

444. “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

445. “Arguments are too much like disputes.”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

447. “How can you contrive to write so even?”

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

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

— Jane Austen

450. “To be claimed as a good, though in an improper style, is at least better than being rejected as no good at all.”

— Jane Austen