150 Best Jane Austen Quotes: Timeless Wisdom from Literature's Most Beloved Author
Jane Austen (1775-1817) remains one of the most cherished authors in English literature, whose sharp wit, keen observations of human nature, and masterful storytelling continue to captivate readers over two centuries after her death. Born in Hampshire, England, Austen wrote six major novels that have become cornerstones of classic literature: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion.
What makes Austen's work truly remarkable is her ability to weave profound insights about love, society, and human character into stories that feel both timeless and deeply personal. Her quotes reveal a woman of extraordinary intelligence, humor, and understanding of the human heart. From biting social commentary to tender expressions of love, Austen's words continue to inspire, challenge, and delight readers around the world.
In this comprehensive collection, we've gathered 150 of Jane Austen's most memorable quotes, organized thematically to showcase the breadth and depth of her wisdom. Whether you're seeking inspiration about love, courage, personal growth, or simply the art of living well, you'll find Austen's words as relevant today as they were in Regency England.
Table of Contents
- Love and Romance
- Wisdom and Self-Knowledge
- Courage and Character
- Friendship and Society
- Books and Learning
- Happiness and Hope
- Women and Independence
- Life Lessons and Observations
Love and Romance
Jane Austen's novels are celebrated for their romantic plots, but her true genius lies in her nuanced understanding of love in all its forms. These quotes capture the complexity, beauty, and sometimes absurdity of romantic relationships.
"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." - Jane Austen
"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun." - Jane Austen
"Oh, Lizzy! do anything rather than marry without affection." - Jane Austen
"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!" - Jane Austen
"If I could but know his heart, everything would become easy." - Jane Austen
"There could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison" - Jane Austen
"I come here with no expectations, only to profess, now that I am at liberty to do so, that my heart is and always will be...yours." - Jane Austen
"Had I been in love, I could not have been more wretchedly blind. But vanity, not love, has been my folly." - Jane Austen
"Where people are really attached, poverty itself is wealth." - 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
"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment." - Jane Austen
"To love is to burn, to be on fire." - Jane Austen
"The very first moment I beheld him, my heart was irrevocably gone." - Jane Austen
"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more." - Jane Austen
"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." - Jane Austen
"There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart." - Jane Austen
"I have not the pleasure of understanding you." - Jane Austen
"My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you." - Jane Austen
"When I fall in love, it will be forever." - Jane Austen
Wisdom and Self-Knowledge
Austen's profound understanding of human nature shines through in these quotes about personal growth, self-awareness, and the pursuit of wisdom.
"I must learn to be content with being happier than I deserve." - Jane Austen
"You must be the best judge of your own happiness." - Jane Austen
"How quick come the reasons for approving what we like." - Jane Austen
"Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation." - Jane Austen
"We all have our best guides within us, if only we would listen." - Jane Austen
"Know your own happiness." - Jane Austen
"Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure." - Jane Austen
"One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it." - Jane Austen
"There are people, who the more you do for them, the less they will do for themselves." - Jane Austen
"Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously." - Jane Austen
"To be fond of dancing was a certain step towards falling in love." - Jane Austen
"Nothing ever fatigues me but doing what I do not like." - Jane Austen
"My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation." - Jane Austen
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." - Jane Austen
"I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal." - Jane Austen
"An interval of meditation, serious and grateful, was the best corrective of everything dangerous." - Jane Austen
"Life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings." - Jane Austen
"Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way." - Jane Austen
"Indulge your imagination in every possible flight." - Jane Austen
Courage and Character
These quotes reveal Austen's admiration for strength of character, moral courage, and the importance of staying true to oneself.
"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." - Jane Austen
"What! Would I be turned back from doing a thing that I had determined to do, and that I knew to be right, by the airs and interference of such a person, or any person I may say? No, I have no idea of being so easily persuaded. When I have made up my mind, I have made it." - Jane Austen
"You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." - Jane Austen
"I cannot speak well enough to be unintelligible." - Jane Austen
"My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me." - Jane Austen
"I am not romantic, you know; I never was." - Jane Austen
"I will not say that your mulberry-trees are dead, but I am afraid they are not alive." - Jane Austen
"I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other." - Jane Austen
"There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort." - Jane Austen
"I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love." - Jane Austen
"A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill." - Jane Austen
"Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world." - Jane Austen
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen
"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!" - Jane Austen
"The distance is nothing when one has a motive." - Jane Austen
"To you I shall say, as I have often said before, Do not be in a hurry, the right man will come at last." - Jane Austen
"I may have lost my heart, but not my self-control." - Jane Austen
"Till this moment I never knew myself." - Jane Austen
Friendship and Society
Austen's keen observations about social relationships and the nature of true friendship provide timeless insights into human connections.
"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." - Jane Austen
"Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does." - Jane Austen
"Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love." - Jane Austen
"To be sure, a love match was the only thing for happiness." - Jane Austen
"Good-humored, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women." - Jane Austen
"A person may be proud without being vain." - Jane Austen
"I wish, as well as everybody else, to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way." - Jane Austen
"We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be." - Jane Austen
"Nobody minds having what is too good for them." - Jane Austen
"It is very unfair to judge of any body's conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation." - Jane Austen
"Those who do not complain are never pitied." - Jane Austen
"One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty." - Jane Austen
"Stupid men are the only ones worth knowing after all." - 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
"I do not think it is worthwhile to wait for enjoyment until there is some real opportunity for it." - Jane Austen
"Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility." - Jane Austen
"We do not look in our great cities for our best morality." - Jane Austen
Books and Learning
As a writer herself, Austen had much to say about the importance of reading, education, and the life of the mind.
"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid." - Jane Austen
"I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book!" - Jane Austen
"But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?" "Yes, I am fond of history." "I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all -- it is very tiresome." - Jane Austen
"The little things are infinitely the most important." - 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." - Jane Austen
"She was heartily ashamed of her ignorance - a misplaced shame. Where people wish to attach, they should always be ignorant. To come with a well−informed mind is to come with an inability of administering to the vanity of others, which a sensible person would always wish to avoid. A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can." - Jane Austen
"I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman's feelings." - Jane Austen
"A fondness for reading, properly directed, must be an education in itself." - Jane Austen
"Next to being married, a girl likes to be crossed in love a little now and then." - Jane Austen
"Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow." - Jane Austen
"The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it." - Jane Austen
"Facts are such horrid things!" - Jane Austen
"I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine." - Jane Austen
"What are young men to rocks and mountains?" - Jane Austen
"If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, she must seek them abroad." - Jane Austen
"With men he can be rational and unaffected, but when he has ladies to please, every feature works." - Jane Austen
"Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery." - Jane Austen
"Without music, life would be a blank to me." - Jane Austen
Happiness and Hope
Austen understood that happiness is both a choice and an art, as these uplifting quotes demonstrate.
"I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but not one with such justice. I am happier even than Jane; she only smiles, I laugh." - Jane Austen
"To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect" - Jane Austen
"It is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible." - Jane Austen
"Every moment has its pleasures and its hope." - Jane Austen
"Why not seize the pleasure at once? -- How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!" - Jane Austen
"but a sanguine temper, though for ever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. it soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again." - Jane Austen
"A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of." - Jane Austen
"Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort." - Jane Austen
"...when pain is over, the remembrance of it often becomes a pleasure." - Jane Austen
"To sit in the shade on a fine day and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment." - Jane Austen
"One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other." - Jane Austen
"There will be little rubs and disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much." - Jane Austen
"Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure." - Jane Austen
"I must try to subdue my mind to my fortune. I must learn to brook being happier than I deserve." - Jane Austen
"Nobody can tell what I suffer! But it is always so. Those who do not complain are never pitied." - Jane Austen
"Perfect happiness, even in memory, is not common." - Jane Austen
"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." - Jane Austen
"Surprises are foolish things. The pleasure is not enhanced, and the inconvenience is often considerable." - Jane Austen
Women and Independence
Austen was ahead of her time in advocating for women's intelligence, independence, and equality.
"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." - Jane Austen
"I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs, all talk of woman's fickleness. But perhaps you will say, these were all written by men." "Perhaps I shall. Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. 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
"The advantages of natural folly in a beautiful girl have been already set forth by the capital pen of a sister author; and to her treatment of the subject I will only add, in justice to men, that though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire anything more in woman than ignorance." - Jane Austen
"Woe betide him, and her too, when it comes to things of consequence, when they are placed in circumstances requiring fortitude and strength of mind, if she have not resolution enough to resist idle interference ... It is the worst evil of too yielding and indecisive a character, that no influence over it can be depended on. You are never sure of a good impression being durable; everybody may sway it. Let those who would be happy be firm." - Jane Austen
"I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any." - Jane Austen
"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." - Jane Austen
"It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage." - Jane Austen
"Single women have a dreadful propensity for being poor, which is one very strong argument in favour of matrimony." - Jane Austen
"I could not sit seriously down to write a serious Romance under any other motive than to save my life." - Jane Austen
"An engaged woman is always more agreeable than a disengaged." - Jane Austen
"A lady, without a family, was the very best preserver of furniture in the world." - 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
"It would be mortifying to the feelings of many ladies, could they be made to understand how little the heart of man is affected by what is costly or new in their attire." - Jane Austen
"There are certainly not so many men of large fortune in the world, as there are pretty women to deserve them." - Jane Austen
"We women are always in extremes; perpetual sunshine or perpetual shade." - Jane Austen
"I always deserve the best treatment, because I never put up with any other." - Jane Austen
"Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint." - Jane Austen
"A woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can." - Jane Austen
Life Lessons and Observations
These final quotes showcase Austen's wit, wisdom, and timeless observations about life, society, and human nature.
"Fanny spoke her feelings. 'Here's harmony!' said she; 'here's repose! Here's what may leave all painting and all music behind, and what may tranquillise every care, and lift the heart to rapture! When I look out on such a night as this, I feel as if there could be neither wickedness nor sorrow in the world; and there certainly would be less of both if the sublimity of Nature were more attended to, and people were carried more out of themselves by contemplating such a scene.'" - Jane Austen
"She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men." - Jane Austen
"It is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are they the result of previous study?" - Jane Austen
"If this man had not twelve thousand a year, he would be a very stupid fellow." - Jane Austen
"They were within twenty yards of each other, and so abrupt was his appearance, that it was impossible to avoid his sight. Their eyes instantly met, and the cheeks of each were overspread with the deepest blush. He absolutely started, and for a moment seemed immoveable from surprise; but shortly recovering himself, advanced towards the party, and spoke to Elizabeth, if not in terms of perfect composure, at least of perfect civility." - Jane Austen
"Angry people are not always wise." - Jane Austen
"I have not a doubt of your doing very well together. Your tempers are by no means unlike. You are each of you so complying, that nothing will ever be resolved on." - Jane Austen
"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents." - Jane Austen
"It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first." - Jane Austen
"How little of permanent happiness could belong to a couple who were only brought together because their passions were stronger than their virtue." - Jane Austen
"You expect me to account for opinions which you choose to call mine, but which I have never acknowledged." - Jane Austen
"We are all fools in love." - Jane Austen
"You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased." - Jane Austen
"I have faults enough, but they are not, I hope, of understanding." - Jane Austen
"Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can." - Jane Austen
"I was quiet, but I was not blind." - Jane Austen
"Time will explain." - Jane Austen
"Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion." - Jane Austen
"The truth is, that in London it is always a sickly season. Nobody is healthy in London, nobody can be." - Jane Austen
Conclusion
Jane Austen's enduring legacy lies not just in her masterful novels, but in the timeless wisdom contained within her words. These 150 quotes reveal an author who understood the complexities of human nature with remarkable clarity and expressed them with unparalleled wit and elegance.
From her insights on love and marriage to her observations about society and human folly, Austen's quotes continue to resonate with readers across cultures and centuries. Her ability to capture universal truths in perfectly crafted sentences ensures that her wisdom remains as relevant today as it was over 200 years ago.
Whether we seek guidance on matters of the heart, courage in the face of adversity, or simply a clever observation to brighten our day, Jane Austen's words offer both comfort and challenge. She reminds us to think for ourselves, to value true friendship, to seek happiness wisely, and above all, to approach life with both sense and sensibility.
In a world that often feels chaotic and uncertain, Austen's quotes provide a touchstone of wit, wisdom, and humanity. They remind us that while fashions and technologies may change, the fundamental experiences of being human—love, loss, growth, and the search for meaning—remain constant. Through her timeless words, Jane Austen continues to be our guide, our companion, and our inspiration.
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