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Jane Austen

English novelist noted for her insightful portrayals of middle-class families (1775-1817)

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A large income is the best recipe for happiness I ever heard of.
But when a young lady is to be a heroine, the perverseness of forty surrounding families cannot prevent her. Something must and will happen to throw a hero in her way.
Everybody likes to go their own way--to choose their own time and manner of devotion.
For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors and laugh at them in our turn?
Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.
I cannot think well of a man who sports with any woman's feelings and there may often be a great deal more suffered than a stander-by can judge of.
I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me that trouble of liking them.
I do not want people to be agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them.
I pay very little regard...to what any young person says on the subject of marriage. If they profess a disinclination for it, I only set it down that they have not yet seen the right person.
If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient at others, so bewildered and so weak and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond control We are, to be sure, a miracle every way but our powers of recollecting and of forgetting do seem peculiarly past finding out.
In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.
It is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage.
It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.
Nothing amuses me more than the easy manner with which everybody settles the abundance of those who have a great deal less than themselves.
Oh do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.
One cannot be always laughing at a man without now and then stumbling on something witty.
One cannot fix one's eyes on the commonest natural production without finding food for a rambling fancy.
One does not love a place the less for having suffered in it unless it has all been suffering, nothing but suffering.
One half of the world can not understand the pleasures of the other.
One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other.
Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.
The enthusiasm of a woman's love is even beyond the biographer's.
There is not one in a hundred of either sex who is not taken in when they marry . It is, of all transactions, the one in which people expect most from others, and are least honest themselves.
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.
Those who do not complain are never pitied.
To sit in the shade on a fine day, and look upon verdure is the most perfect refreshment.
We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.
We met Dr. Hall in such deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead.
What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
What dreadful weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance.
Where any one body of educated men, of whatever denomination, are condemned indiscriminately, there must be a deficiency of information, or...of something else.
Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong
Where so many hours have been spent in convincing myself that I am right, is there not some reason to fear I may be wrong?
Why not seize the pleasure at once, how often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparations.

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