Jane Austen

What is right to be done cannot be done too soon.

I am determined that nothing but the deepest love could ever induce me into matrimony.

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

I do not think, sir, you have any right to command me, merely because you are the second son.

The loss of virtue in a female is the loss of everything.

Oh! it is only a novel! ... only some work in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language.

I write only to relieve my own feelings.

I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of any thing than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.

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.

We are all fools in love.

It is not time or opportunity that is to determine intimacy;—it is disposition alone. Seven years would be insufficient to make some people acquainted with each other, and seven days are more than enough for others.

Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore every body, not excepting even the hero, to perfect felicity.

If a woman is partial to a man, and does not endeavour to conceal it, he must find it out.

Sense and sensibility are so different, you know, that they are hardly ever united.

To wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.

I have not the smallest intention of being married at present.

Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?

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.

A man does not necessarily cease to be a pleasing companion, because he is an agreeable man.

All the privilege I claim for my 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.