You are in a melancholy humor, and fancy that anyone unlike yourself must be happy. But remember that the pain of parting from friends will be felt by everybody at times, whatever be their education or state. Know your own happiness. You want nothing but patience — or give it a more fascinating name, call it hope.

— Jane Austen

You are infinitely my superior in merit; all that I know - You have qualities which I had not supposed to exist in such a degree in any human creature. You have some touches of the angel in you, beyond what - not merely beyond what one sees, because one never sees anything like it - but beyond what one fancies might be. But still I am not frightened. It is not by equality of merit that you can be won. That is out of the question. It is he who sees and worships your merit the strongest, who loves you most devotedly, that has the best right to a return.” (326)

— Jane Austen

You are mistaken, Mr. Darcy, if you suppose that the mode of your declaration affected me in any other way, than as it spared the concern which I might have felt in refusing you, had you behaved in a more gentlemanlike manner." (Elizabeth Bennett)

— Jane Austen

You are very fond of bending little minds; but where little minds belong to rich people in authority, I think they have a knack of swelling out, till they are quite as unmanageable as great ones.

— Jane Austen

You feel, I suppose, that, in losing Isabella, you lose half yourself: you feel a void in your heart which nothing else can occupy.  Society is becoming irksome; and as for the amusements in which you were wont to share at Bath, the very idea of which without her is abhorrent.  You would not, for instance, now go to a ball for the world.  You feel that you have no longer any friend to whom you can speak with unreserve; on whose regard you can place dependence; or whose counsel, in any difficult, you could rely on.

— Jane Austen

You judge very properly, and it is happy for you that you possess the talent of flattering with delicacy. May I ask whether these pleasing attentions proceed from the impulse of the moment, or are the result of previous study?

— Jane Austen

You may well warn me against such an evil. Human nature is so prone to fall into it!

— Jane Austen

You men have none of you any hearts.'' If we have no hearts, we have eyes; and they give us torment enough.

— Jane Austen

You must be the best judge of your own happiness.

— Jane Austen

You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.

— Jane Austen