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I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle.

Jane Austen

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Jane Austen
Age: 101 †
Born: 1775
Born: December 16
Died: 1877
Died: July 24
Novelist
Short Story Writer
Writer
Steventon
Hampshire
Practice
Though
Life
Selfishness
Selfish
Principle
Principles

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A person who can write a long letter with ease, cannot write ill.
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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.
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I am only resolved to act in that manner, which will, in my own opinion, constitute my happiness, without reference to you, or to any person so wholly unconnected with me.
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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.
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Without thinking highly either of men or of matrimony, marriage had always been her object it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want.
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Time will generally lessen the interest of every attachment not within the daily circle.
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There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil, a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome. And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody. And yours, he replied with a smile, is wilfully to misunderstand them.
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I am not at all in a humour for writing I must write on till I am.
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One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight.
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I can safely say, that the happiest part of my life has been spent on board a ship.
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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.
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She was stronger alone.
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A very short trial convinced her that a curricle was the prettiest equipage in the world.
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It does not appear to me that my hand is unworthy your acceptance, or that the establishment I can offer would be any other than highly desirable.
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Almost anything is possible with time
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I am afraid that the pleasantness of an employment does not always evince its propriety.
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I am come, young ladies, in a very moralizing strain, to observe that our pleasures of this world are always to be for, and that we often purchase them at a great disadvantage, giving readi-monied actual happiness for a draft on the future, that may not be honoured.
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They walked on, without knowing in what direction. There was too much to be thought, and felt, and said, for attention to any other objects.
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And we mean to treat you all,' added Lydia, 'but you must lend us the money, for we have just spent ours at the shop out there.
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You deserve a longer letter than this but it is my unhappy fate seldom to treat people so well as they deserve.
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