Jane Austen Life Quotations

The sooner every party breaks up the better.

One has not great hopes from Birmingham. I always say there is something direful in the sound.

Angry people are not always wise.

We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.

I believe you [men] capable of everything great and good in your married lives. I believe you equal to every important exertion, and to every domestic forbearance, so long as - if I may be allowed the expression, so long as you have an object. I mean, while the woman you love lives, and lives for you. 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.

It is indolence... Indolence and love of ease; a want of all laudable ambition, of taste for good company, or of inclination to take the trouble of being agreeable, which make men clergymen. A clergyman has nothing to do but be slovenly and selfish; read the newspaper, watch the weather, and quarrel with his wife. His curate does all the work and the business of his own life is to dine.

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.

At my time of life opinions are tolerably fixed. It is not likely that I should now see or hear anything to change them.

I could not sit down to write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.