“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 before-hand, 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
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage. A man always imagines a woman to be ready for anybody who asks her.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage. Fidelity and complaisance are the principle duties of both; and those men who do not choose to dance or to marry them selves, have no business with the partners or wives of the neighbors.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“A man would always wish to give a woman a better home than the one he takes her from; and he who can do it, where there is no doubt of her regard, must, I think, be the happiest of mortals.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“What did she say?–Just what she ought, of course. A lady always does.–She said enough to show there need not be despair–and to invite him to say more himself.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“In all the important preparations of the mind she was complete; being prepared for matrimony by an hatred of home, restraint, and tranquillity; by the misery of disappointed affection, and contempt of the man she was to marry. The rest might wait. The preparations of new carriages and furniture might wait for London and the spring, when her own taste could have fairer play.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“Husbands and wives generally understand when opposition will be vain.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Marriage
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“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. 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.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Vanity
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“Vanity working on a weak head, produces every sort of mischief.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Vanity
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“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 any thing, should conceal it as well as she can.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Vanity
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“History, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in…. 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 and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“It was the misfortune of poetry, to be seldom safely enjoyed by those who enjoyed it completely; and that the strong feelings which alone could estimate it truly, were the very feelings which ought to taste it but sparingly.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Poetry
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“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Imagination
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“Give a girl an education and introduce her properly into the world, and ten to one but she has the means of settling well, without further expense to anybody.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“If people like to read their books, it is all very well, but to be at so much trouble in filling great volumes, which, as I used to think, nobody would willingly ever look into, to be labouring only for the torment of little boys and girls, always struck me as a hard fate.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“Shakespeare one gets acquainted with without knowing how. It is part of a British man’s constitution. His thoughts and beauties are so spread abroad that one touches them every where, one is intimate with him by instinct.–No man of any brain can open at a good part of one of his plays, without falling into the flow of his meaning immediately.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“I am pleased that you have learned to love a hyacinth. The mere habit of learning to love is the thing; and a teachableness of disposition in a young lady is a great blessing.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Education
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“Goldsmith tells us, that when lovely woman stoops to folly, she has nothing to do but to die; and when she stoops to be disagreeable, it is equally to be recommended as a clearer of ill-fame.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Death
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“There is something so amiable in the prejudices of a young mind, that one is sorry to see them give way to the reception of more general opinions.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Youth
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“Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the mostcharming girl in the world.”
Jane Austen
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Youth
