Jane Austen

“Nobody minds having what is too good for them.”

“We do not look in our great cities for our best morality.”

“To look almost pretty is an acquisition of higher delight to a girl who has been looking plain for the first fifteen years of her life than a beauty from her cradle can ever receive.”

“My idea of good company is the company of clever, well-informed people who have a great deal of conversation; that is what I call good company.”

“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.”

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.”

“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. I will not allow books to prove anything.”

“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.”

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

“General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be.”

“Business, you know, may bring you money, but friendship hardly ever does.”

“Happiness in marriage is entirely a matter of chance.”

“A lady's imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony in a moment.”

“There is nothing like staying at home for real comfort.”

“Nobody, who has not been in the interior of a family, can say what the difficulties of any individual of that family may be.”

“Selfishness must always be forgiven you know, because there is no hope of a cure.”

“Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love.”