Quotes from Jane Austen

I wrote without much effort; for I was rich, and the rich are always respectable, whatever be their style of writing.

The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be.

Another stupid party last night; perhaps if larger they might be less intolerable, but here there were only just enough to make one card-table, with six people to look on and talk nonsense to each other.

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.' 'You are mistaken,' said he gently, 'that is not good company, that is the best.

[A]utumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling. She occupied her mind as much as possible in such like musings and quotations...

Mrs. Bennet was restored to her usual querulous serenity.

She had been forced into prudence in her youth, she learned romance as she grew older—the natural sequence of an unnatural beginning.

Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object; it was the only honorable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.

3 or 4 families in a Country Village is the very thing to work on.

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

A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of. It certainly may secure all the myrtle and turkey part of it.

The little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labor.

With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please every feature works.

May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?

One man's ways may be as good as another's, but we all like our own best.

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

Mr. Collins had only to change from Jane to Elizabeth—and it was soon done—done while Mrs. Bennet was stirring the fire.

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

We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.

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

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.

She [Mrs. Bennet] was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper.

The post office has a great charm at one point of our lives. When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for.