Jane Austen quotes & passages

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

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.

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.

If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am.

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.

Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

I am the happiest creature in the world. Perhaps other people have said so before, but no one with such justice.

My good opinion once lost is lost for ever.

There is a stubbornness about me that never can bear to be frightened at the will of others. My courage always rises with every attempt to intimidate me.

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

I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.

Till this moment, I never knew myself.

I do not know whether it ought to be so, but certainly silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way. Wickedness is always wickedness, but folly is not always folly.

One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.

“There is no charm equal to tenderness of heart,” said she afterwards to herself. “There is nothing to be compared to it.”

My idea of good company, Mr Elliot, is the company of clever, well-informed people, who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.

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.

The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.

An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents. Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr. Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.