Jane Austen Quotes

It is very often nothing but our own vanity that deceives us. Women fancy admiration means more than it does. And men take care that they should.

People are always throwing things at me that I've said and I say that I didn't mean anything.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.

Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself

Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

If you criticize a fine genius, the odds are that you are out of your reckoning, and, instead of the poet, are censuring your owncaricature of him.

My radar, after all these years of sanity, is still off when it comes to what people do or don't mean.

I would by all means have men beware, lest Æsop's pretty fable of the fly that sate [sic] on the pole of a chariot at the Olympic races and said, 'What a dust do I raise,' be verified in them. For so it is that some small observation, and that disturbed sometimes by the instrument, sometimes by the eye, sometimes by the calculation, and which may be owing to some real change in the heaven, raises new heavens and new spheres and circles.

Your enemy is one who misunderstands you; why should you not rise above the fog and see his error and respect him for the good qualities you find in him?

Misunderstanding is my cornerstone. It's everyone's, come to think of it. Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet.

Just because I have rice on my clothes doesn't mean I've been to a wedding. A Chinese man threw up on me.

Who would have thought that a means of communication limited to 140 characters would ever create misunderstanding?

Just because I didn't do what you told me, doesn't mean I wasn't listening to you!

You're wrong means that I don't understand you, I'm not seeing what you're seeing- and I'm not seeing all of you there is to see. But there is nothing wrong with you. You are what you need to be, doing what you need to be doing, and although I may take steps to protect myself of others, I do not know all and therefore am literally inadequate to judge.

Sometimes when you look back on a situation, you realize it wasn't all you thought it was. A beautiful girl walked into your life. You fell in love. Or did you? Perhaps, it was only a childish infatuation, or maybe just a brief moment of vanity.

My sense of humor doesn't translate well into print, some of the things I say can be offensive or found offensive even though I don't mean them that way. So I have been told to try and censor myself here and there. I'm trying, but I'm not really succeeding at it.

It was a cookie, not a crack pipe.

Jonathan sighed. The price of being misunderstood, he thought. They call you devil or they call you god.

People who read me seem to be divided into four groups: twenty-five percent like me for the right reasons; twenty-five percent like me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the wrong reasons; twenty-five percent hate me for the right reasons. It's that last twenty-five percent that worries me.

How wrong to think I was anyone else, like thinking grass stains make you a beautiful view, like getting kissed makes you kissable, like feeling warm makes you coffee, like liking movies makes you a director. How utterly incorrect to think it any other way, a box of crap is treasures, a boy smiling means it, a gentle moment is a life improved.

The hitter asks the owner to give him a big raise so he can go somewhere he's never been, and the owner says "You mean third base?"

Fools, they do not even know how much more is the half than the whole.

... it's always interesting when one doesn't see. If you don't see what a thing means, you must be looking at it wrong way round.

The critics. When they're right, they're right for the wrong reasons. And they're usually wrong.

The word "metaphor" means carrying something from one place to another . . . and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This means that the word "metaphor" is a metaphor. I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining and apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.