Maria Edgeworth Quotes - Page 2

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

In marrying, a man does not, to be sure, marry his wife's mother; and yet a prudent man, when he begins to think of the daughter, would look sharp at the mother; ay, and back to the grandmother too, and along the whole female line of ancestry.

sometimes the very faults of parents produce a tendency to opposite virtues in their children.

a straight line is the shortest possible line between any two points - an axiom equally true in morals as in mathematics.

I've a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die.

The everlasting quotation-lover dotes on the husks of learning.

Books only spoil the originality of genius. Very well for those who can't think for themselves - But when one has made up one's opinions, there is no use in reading.

It is unjust and absurd of those advancing in years, to expect of the young that confidence should come all and only on their side: the human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.

When one illusion vanishes, another shall appear, and, still leading me forward towards an horizon that retreats as I advance, the happy prospect of futurity shall vanish only with my existence.

Young ladies who think of nothing but dress, public amusements, and forming what they call high connexions, are undoubtedly most easily managed, by the fear of what the world will say of them.

Let the sexes mutually forgive each other their follies; or, what is much better, let them combine their talents for their general advantage.

there is no reasoning with imagination.

Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.

How is it that hope so powerfully excites, and fear so absolutely depresses all our faculties?

Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.

It is quite fitting that charity should begin at home ... but then it should not end at home; for those that help nobody will find none to help them in time of need.

When the mind is full of any one subject, that subject seems to recur with extraordinary frequency - it appears to pursue or to meet us at every turn: in every conversation that we hear in every book we open, in every newspaper we take up, the reigning idea recurs; and then we are surprised, and exclaim at these wonderful coincidences.

Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man's mind, under the general head of liberty.

why will friends publish all the trash they can scrape together of celebrated people?

Beauties are always curious about beauties, and wits about wits.

How success changes the opinion of men!

Alarmed successively by every fashionable medical terror of the day, she dosed her children with every specific which was publicly advertised or privately recommended...The consequence was, that the dangers, which had at first been imaginary, became real: these little victims of domestic medicine never had a day's health: they looked, and were, more dead than alive.

Politeness only teaches us to save others from unnecessary pain.... You are not bound by politeness to tell any falsehoods.

[On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets.

... an inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning, that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both.