Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward Quotes

It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.

Imagination is built upon knowledge.

What an immense power over life is the power of possessing distinct aims.

Truth, like climate, is common property.

I believe in women; and in their right to their own best possibilities in every department of life. I believe that the methods ofdress practiced among women are a marked hindrance to the realization of these possibilities, and should be scorned or persuaded out of society.

Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

To exist as an advertisement of her husband's income, or her father's generosity, has become a second nature to many a woman who must have undergone, one would say, some long and subtle process of degradation before she sunk [sic] so low, or grovelled so serenely.

A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.

What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.

... to work, to work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be reputable. I think I always respected a goodblacksmith more than a lady of leisure.

Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air.

Next to the love between man and his Creator, The love of one man and one woman, Is the loftiest and the most illusive ideal, That has been set before the world. A perfect marriage is like a pure heart: Those who have it are fit to see God.

The great law of denial belongs to the powerful forces of life, whether the case be one of coolish baked beans, or an unrequited affection.

It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.

Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.

It is in the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered ... that we are behind our age.... sympathy as a fine art is backward in the growth of progress.

A perfect marriage is like a pure heart ... those who have it are fit to see God.

... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.

The literary artist will ... portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?

It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.

The rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives, are by no means the saddest.

Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn.

... it seems to have been my luck to stumble into various forms of progress, to which I have been of the smallest possible use; yet for whose sake I have suffered the discomfort attending all action in moral improvements, without the happiness of knowing that this was clearly quite worth while.

Surely it is one of the requisites of a tasteful garb that the expression of effort to please shall be wanting in it; that the mysteries of the toilet shall not be suggested by it; that the steps to its completion shall be knocked away like the sculptor's ladder from the statue, and the mental force expended upon it be swept away out of sight like the chips on the studio floor.