Quotes by Jane Austen

“Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth.”

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

“You are very fond of bending little minds; but where little minds belong to rich people in authority, I think they have a knack of swelling out, till they are quite as unmanageable as great ones.”

“He had suffered, and he had learnt to think, two advantages that he had never known before…”

“It would be most right, and most wise, and, therefore must involve least suffering.”

“I understand you.—You do not suppose that I have ever felt much.—For four months, Marianne, I have had all this hanging on my mind, without being at liberty to speak of it to a single creature; kno...”

“If I could not be persuaded into doing what I thought wrong, I will never be tricked into it.”

“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.”

“[Mrs. Allen was] never satisfied with the day unless she spent the chief of it by the side of Mrs. Thorpe, in what they called conversation, but in which there was scarcely ever any exchange of opi...”

“To exemplify, -a beautiful glossy nut, which, blessed with original strength, has outlived all the storms of autumn. Not a puncture, not a weak spot any where. -This nut... while so many of its bre...”

“Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. — It is not fair. — He has fame and profit enough as a poet, and should not be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. — I...”

“Well, evil to some is always good to others.”

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

“It was impossible to quarrel with words, whose tremulous inequality showed indisposition so plainly.”

“...and yet, though desirous to be gone, she could not quit the mansion-house, or look an adieu to the cottage, with its black, dripping and comfortless veranda, or even notice through the misty gla...”

“Her feelings were very acute, and too little understood to be properly attended to. Nobody meant to be unkind, but nobody put themselves out of their way to secure her comfort.”

“Alas! with all her reasoning, she found, that to retentive feelings eight years may be little more than nothing.”

“Your feelings may be the strongest,’ replied Anne, ‘but the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer liv...”

“My ideas flow so rapidly that I have not time to express them──by which means my letters sometimes convey no ideas at all to my correspondents.”

“She hated herself more than she could express.”