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"Undoubtedly ... there is a meanness in all the arts which ladies sometimes condescend to employ for captivation. What bears affinity to cunning is despicable."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, ch. 8 (1813). |
"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 (1775-1817), British novelist. The narrator, in Northanger Abbey, ch. 14 (1818). |
"A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, ch. 6 (1813). |
"Though to the larger and more trifling part of the sex, imbecility in females is a great enhancement of their personal charms, there is a portion of them too reasonable and too well informed themselves to desire any thing more in woman than ignorance."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. The narrator, in Northanger Abbey, ch. 14 (1818). |
"Good-humoured, unaffected girls, will not do for a man who has been used to sensible women. They are two distinct orders of being."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park, ch. 35 (1814). |
"There seems almost a general wish of descrying the capacity and undervaluing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. The narrator, in Northanger Abbey, ch. 5 (1818). |
"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."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. Edmund, in Mansfield Park, ch. 9 (1814). |
"To look almost pretty, is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain the first fifteen years of her life, than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. The narrator, in Northanger Abbey, ch. 1 (1818). |
"I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. Elinor, in Sense and Sensibility, ch. 13 (1811). |
"Woman is fine for her own satisfaction alone. No man will admire her the more, no woman will like her the better for it. Neatness and fashion are enough for the former, and a something of shabbiness or impropriety will be most endearing to the latter."
Jane Austen (1775-1817), British novelist. The narrator, in Northanger Abbey, ch. 10 (1818). |
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Jane Austen
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