In this post, we’ll delve into the world of *Jane Austen quotes who was an English novelist known for her keen observations of the British landed gentry in the early 19th century.
Jane Austen (1775–1817) was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England, and she spent most of her life in the rural English countryside. She came from a close-knit family and she was the seventh of eight children. Her family played a significant role in her life, and her experiences with them likely influenced her understanding of social relationships, manners, and familial dynamics.
Her novels often explore themes such as love, marriage, social expectations, and the role of women in society.
During her lifetime, Jane Austen’s novels were published anonymously. Her works were attributed to “A Lady” on the title page. It was only after her death that her authorship became widely known. Some of her major works include, “Sense and Sensibility” (1811), “Pride and Prejudice” (1813), “Mansfield Park” (1814), “Emma” (1815) and “Persuasion” (1817).
Let’s read some of the best Jane Austen’s quotes about love, marriage, feminism, happiness and more.
Jane Austen Quotes on Love
1. “In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.”
2. “There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”
3. “The more I know of the world, the more I am convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!”
4. “If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more.”
5. “There is safety in reserve, but no attraction. One cannot love a reserved person.”
6. “You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope… I have loved none but you!”
7. “There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of merit or sense.”
8. “Is not general incivility the very essence of love?”
9. “When I fall in love, it will be forever.”
10. “There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison”
11. “I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control.”
12. “I can listen no longer in silence. I must speak to you by such means as are within my reach. You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago.”
13. “Where the heart is really attached, I know very well how little one can be pleased with the attention of anybody else.”
14. “The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone.”
15. “Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of both were overspread with the deepest blush.”
Jane Austen Quotes on Feminism
1. “Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.”
2. “Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.”
3. “There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises at every attempt to intimidate me.”
4. “I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.”
5. “I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.”
6. “All the privilege I claim for my own sex (it is not a very enviable one: you need not covet it), is that of loving longest, when existence or when hope is gone!”
7. “I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”
8. “There, I will stake my last like a woman of spirit. No cold prudence for me. I am not born to sit still and do nothing. If I lose the game, it shall not be from not striving or it”
Jane Austen Quotes on Marriage
1. “A woman is not to marry a man merely because she is asked, or because he is attached to her, and can write a tolerable letter.”
2. “Do anything rather than marry without affection.”
3. “When any two young people take it into their heads to marry, they are pretty sure by perseverance to carry their point, be they ever so poor, or ever so imprudent, or ever so little likely to be necessary to each other’s ultimate comfort.”
4. “From the very beginning—from the first moment, I may almost say—of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish distain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of the disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world on whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”
5. “It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy; it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.”
6. “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.”
7. “Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”
Jane Austen Quotes on Friendship
1. “Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
2. “There is nothing I would not do for those who are really my friends. I have no notion of loving people by halves, it is not my nature.”
3. “General benevolence, but not general friendship, makes a man what he ought to be.”
Jane Austen Quotes on Reading & Books
1. “I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it. I assure you, if it had not been to meet you, I would not have come away from it for all the world.”
2. “I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!”
3. “But for my own part, if a book is well written, I always find it too short.”
4. “The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”
Jane Austen Quotes on Woman
1. “A young woman in love always looks like Patience on a monument Smiling at Grief.”
2. “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.”
3. “Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone.”
4. “If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad.”
5. “Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor. Which is one very strong argument in favor of matrimony.”
6. “I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
7. “She was sensible and clever, but eager in everything; her sorrows, her joys, could have no moderation.”
8. “I will be calm. I will be mistress of myself.”
9. “She was convinced that she could have been happy with him, when it was no longer likely they should meet.”
10. “Her own thoughts and reflections were habitually her best companions.”
11. “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
12. “Do not consider me now as an elegant female, intending to play you, but as a rational creature, speaking the truth from her heart.”
Jane Austen Wisdom Quotes
1. “Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”
2. “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.”
3. “There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves.”
4. “It is very difficult for the prosperous to be humble.”
5. “Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.”
6. “But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them forever.”
7. “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.”
8. “Don’t imagine that nobody in this house can see or judge but yourself. Don’t act yourself, if you do not like it, but don’t expect to govern everybody else.”
9. “Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.”
10. What one means one day, you know, one may not mean the next. Circumstances change, opinions alter.”
Jane Austen Inspirational Quotes
1. “The distance is nothing when one has motive.”
2. “What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.”
3. “Nobody minds having what is too good for them.”
4. “It isn’t what we say or think that defines us, but what we do.”
5. “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.”
6. “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.”
7. “One man’s ways may be as good as another’s, but we all like our own best.”
Jane Austen Quotes on Happiness
1. “Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience; or give it a more fascinating name: call it hope.”
2. “I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.”
3. “A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.”
4. “I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve.”
5. “I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”
6. “To flatter and follow others, without being flattered and followed in turn, is but a state of half enjoyment.”
7. “…when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure.”
8. “Blessed with so many resources within myself the world was not necessary to me. I could do very well without it.”
9. “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.”
Jane Austen Quotes on Men
1. “One man’s style must not be the rule of another’s.”
2. “What are men to rocks and mountains?”
3. “Every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.”
4. “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
5. “I lay it down as a general rule, Harriet, that if a woman doubts as to whether she should accept a man or not, she certainly ought to refuse him.”
6. “I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman’s feelings; and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.”
7. “You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”
8. “A man does not recover from such devotion of the heart to such a woman! He ought not; he does not.”
Short Jane Austen Quotes
1. “Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.”
2. “Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like.”
3. “My good opinion, once lost, is lost forever.”
4. “Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.”
5. “Which of my important nothings shall I tell you first?”
6. “Angry people are not always wise.”
7. “Those who do not complain are never pitied.”
8. “Without music, life would be a blank to me.”
9. “Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.”
10. “Better be without sense than misapply it as you do.”
11. “Every moment had its pleasure and its hope.”
12. “You must really begin to harden yourself to the idea of being worth looking at.”
13. “Where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.”
14. “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.”
15. “There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart.”
16. “Beware how you give your heart.”
These Jane Austen quotes greatly reflect her keen observations of human nature, social satire, and the lifestyle of the British upper class gentry. The term “Austenesque” is often used to describe works that exhibit qualities similar to those found in her writing.
Despite achieving only modest success during her lifetime, Jane Austen’s novels gained popularity in the 20th century and have since become widely appreciated for their sharp social commentary, vivid characters, and enduring storytelling. Her work has been adapted into numerous films, television series, and stage productions, and her influence on literature and popular culture persists to this day.
*cited quotes are not Jane Austen’s but from her characters in her novels.
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