Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist whose realism, biting social commentary and masterful use of free indirect speech, burlesque, and irony have earned her a place as one of the most widely read and most beloved writers in English literature.

Jane Austen Quotes and Sayings

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

I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman’s feeling.
- Jane Austen

Nobody minds having what is too good for them.
- Jane Austen

But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.
- Jane Austen

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously…. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.
- Jane Austen

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

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

Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
- Jane Austen

I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible.
- Jane Austen

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.
- Jane Austen

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.
- Jane Austen

What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.
- Jane Austen

Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance. If the dispositions of the parties are ever so well known to each other or ever so similar beforehand, it does not advance their felicity in the least. They always continue to grow sufficiently unlike afterwards to have their share of vexation; and it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.
- Jane Austen

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

Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands. I will not allow books to prove anything.
- 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

Loss of virtue in a female is irretrievable; that one false step involves her in endless ruin; that her reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful; and that she cannot be too much guarded in her behavior towards the undeserving of the other sex.
- Jane Austen

No one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with.
- Jane Austen

I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
- Jane Austen

Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then.
- Jane Austen

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

My sore throats are always worse than anyone’s.
- Jane Austen

Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings.
- Jane Austen

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.
- Jane Austen