Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Quotes

• I would rather have young people settle on a small income at once, and have to struggle with a few difficulties together, than be involved in a long engagement.

• We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one; you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone.

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

• In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.

• 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?

• Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.

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

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

• I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me that trouble of liking them.

• For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?

• I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.

• What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.

• A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.

• I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.

• 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.

• Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.

• It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.

• 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.

• Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or...of something else.

• If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient; at others, so bewildered and so weak; and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control! We are, to be sure, a miracle every way; but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.