Jane Austen Quotes

Wickedness is a myth invented by good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.

There can be - there ought to be - no medium course; a love-affair is either sober earnest or contemptible folly, if not wickedness: to gossip about it is, in the first instance, intrusive, unkind, or dangerous; in the second, simply silly.

Silly things do cease to be silly if they are done by sensible people in an impudent way.

Fools are more to be feared than the wicked.

Stupidity always accompanies evil. Or evil, stupidity.

Foolishness is indeed the sister of wickedness.

... a fool

You don't remember people you love by the wise things they say but the silly things they do.

People are never so near playing the fool as when they think themselves wise.

Stupidity has its sublime as well as genius, and he who carries that quality to absurdity has reached it; which is always a source of amusement to sensible people.

Fools are not mad folks.

If others had not been foolish, we should be so.

The fools in this world make about as much trouble as the wicked do.

I am far more provoked at being thought foolish by foolish people, than pleased at being thought sensible by sensible people; and the average proportion of the numbers of each is not to my advantage.

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

One must be a little foolish if one does not want to be even more stupid.

The difference between weakness and wickedness is much less than people suppose; and the consequences are nearly always the same.

Clever people are never credited with their follies: what a deprivation of human rights!

Folly often goes beyond her bounds, but impudence knows none.

There are people who think that everything one does with a serious face is sensible.

Do you think that the things people make fools of themselves about are any less real and true than the things they behave sensibly about? They are more true: they are the only things that are true.

Reputation is a very interesting thing, and I always give people the benefit of the doubt, and I think that there's a part of all of us, especially in a generation where a lot of the stuff gets recorded.

Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.

If people were not wicked I should not mind their being stupid; but, to our misfortune, they are both.

Really! Between you and Eragon, I seem to spend most of my time among the Varden healing people to silly to realize they need to avoid getting chopped into tiny little pieces