I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Reading
There are certainly are not so many men of large fortune in the world as there are of pretty woman to deserve them.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Men, Men & Women, Men and Women, Women
Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Opinion
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.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Religion
Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Sympathy, Pessimism
Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Life
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.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Pride
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Self-Discovery
There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.
—Jane Austen
Let us leave it to the reviewers to abuse such effusions of fancy at their leisure, and over every new novel to talk in threadbare strains of the trash with which the press now groans. Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body.
—Jane Austen
Only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Authors & Writing, Fiction
I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Selfishness
To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.
—Jane Austen
Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?
—Jane Austen
Do not give way to useless alarm; though it is right to be prepared for the worst, there is no occasion to look on it as certain.
—Jane Austen
Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.
—Jane Austen
Topics: Women
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Virginia Woolf English Novelist
Pamela Hansford Johnson English Novelist
Mary Webb English Novelist
Letitia Elizabeth Landon English Poet, Novelist
P. G. Wodehouse English Novelist
D. H. Lawrence English Novelist
Iris Murdoch British Novelist, Philosopher
William Makepeace Thackeray English Novelist
Anthony Trollope English Novelist
Samuel Richardson English Novelist