"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."

"Dress is at all times a frivolous distinction, and excessive solicitude about it often destroys its own aim."

"Where youth and diffidence are united, it requires uncommon steadiness of reason to resist the attraction of being called the most charming girl in the world."

"From politics, it was an easy step to silence."

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

"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."

“In every power, of which taste is the foundation, excellence is pretty fairly divided between the sexes.”

"The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid."

"No man is offended by another man's admiration of the woman he loves; it is the woman only who can make it a torment."

The Books of Jane Austen: