For a few years now, I have been reading my way through the complete works of Jane Austen, and she has become one of my favorite authors. Her characters are vibrant and relatable (looking at you, Lizzie Bennet), and her wit continually surprises me. The thing I love most about her novels is their ability to transcend the boundaries created by time and provide insight about life, love and family. She's extremely quotable, always sassy and full of wisdom, so without further ado here are my top Jane Austen quotes.
1. Pride and Prejudice
“What are men to rocks and mountains?”
“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.”
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
“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.”
“Laugh as much as you choose, but you will not laugh me out of my opinion.”
“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 disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork
of 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 whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry.”
“Her heart did whisper that he had
done it for her.”
2. Persuasion
“You pierce my soul. I am half
agony, half hope...I have loved none but you.”
“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.”
“She hoped to be wise and
reasonable in time; but alas! Alas! She must confess to herself that she was
not wise yet.”
“She felt that she could so much
more depend upon the sincerity of those who sometimes looked or said a careless
or a hasty thing, than of those whose presence of mind never varied, whose
tongue never slipped.”
3. Sense and Sensibility
“It isn't what we say or think that
defines us, but what we do.”
“Know your own happiness. You want
nothing but patience- or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.”
“I wish, as well as everybody else,
to be perfectly happy; but, like everybody else, it must be in my own way.”
4. Emma
“I always deserve the best treatment because I never put up with any other.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Ah! There is nothing like staying at home, for real comfort.”
5. Mansfield Park
“Life seems but a quick succession
of busy nothings.”
“A fondness for reading, properly
directed, must be an education in itself.”
“There will be little rubs and
disappointments everywhere, and we are all apt to expect too much; but then, if
one scheme of happiness fails, human nature turns to another; if the first
calculation is wrong, we make a second better: we find comfort somewhere.”
6. Northanger Abbey
“Beware how you give your heart.”
“Friendship is really the finest
balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”
“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.”
“Oh! I am delighted with the book! I should like to spend my whole life in reading it.”
