Quotes from Jane Austen

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.

A mind lively and at ease, can do with seeing nothing, and can see nothing that does not answer.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.

If things are going untowardly one month, they are sure to mend the next.

Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable.

There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them.

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

One man's style must not be the rule of another's.

I could not be happy with a man whose taste did not in every point coincide with my own. He must enter in all my feelings; the same books, the same music must charm us both.

A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.

That is what I like; that is what a young man ought to be. Whatever be his pursuits, his eagerness in them should know no moderation, and leave him no sense of fatigue.

Fanny! You are killing me!" "No man dies of love but on the stage, Mr. Crawford.

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does. And men take care that they should.

He was not an ill-disposed young man, unless to be rather cold hearted, and rather selfish, is to be ill-disposed.

He was the proudest, most disagreeable man in the world, and every body hoped that he would never come there again.

Of this she was perfectly unaware; to her he was only the man who had made himself agreeable nowhere, and who had not thought her handsome enough to dance with.

We all know him to be a proud, unpleasant sort of man; but this would be nothing if you really liked him.

Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!

She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great a man.

Never could I expect to be so truly beloved and important; so always first and always right in any man's eyes as I am in my father's.

Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.

It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of a man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire.

If any young men come for Mary or Kitty, send them in, for I am quite as leisure.

Where a man does his best with only moderate powers, he will have the advantage over negligent superiority.