The Quotable Jane Austen

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

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

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

A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.
Jane Austen 

A woman, especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can.
Jane Austen 

An artist cannot do anything slovenly.
Jane Austen 

An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged. She is satisfied with herself. Her cares are over, and she feels that she may exert all her powers of pleasing without suspicion. All is safe with a lady engaged; no harm can be done.
Jane Austen 

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

Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim.
Jane Austen 

Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.
Jane Austen 

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

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

From politics, it was an easy step to silence.
Jane Austen 

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

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.
Jane Austen 

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

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.
Jane Austen 

How quick come the reasons for approving what we like!
Jane Austen 

Human nature is so well disposed towards those who are in interesting situations, that a young person, who either marries or dies, is sure of being kindly spoken of.
Jane Austen 

Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.
Jane Austen