Jane Austen

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

What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.

Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.

Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.

To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love.

No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment.

Those who do not complain are never pitied.

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

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.

Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.

There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.

A single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid - the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.

Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken.

Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.

Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being.

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.

They are much to be pitied who have not been given a taste for nature early in life.

To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.

Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.

Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.

It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.

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

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.

My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

Nobody minds having what is too good for them.

General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.

Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.

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.