Mary Augusta Ward Quotes

Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.

praise is a great tonic, and helps most people to do their best.

Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system.

Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.

We all grow on somebody's grave.

Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us? - the one advantage of time!

Learn the lesson of your own pain--learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.

All things change, creeds and philosophies and outward systems - but God remains.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

The delight in natural things - colors, forms, scents - when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended.

But no man has a monopoly of conscience.

There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment.

A victim to certain obscure forms of gout, he was in character neither stupid, nor inhuman, but he suffered from the usual drawbacks of his class, - too much money, and too few ideas.

How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market.

City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.

Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament?

... the strictness of to-day may have at any moment to be purchased by the laxity of to-morrow.

English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century.

To reconceive the Christ! It is the special task of our age.

The only thing which can keep journalism alive - journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment - is - again the Stevensonian secret! - charm.

It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.

But the mind travels far - and mysteriously - in sleep.

There is nothing more startling in human relations that the strong emotion of weak people.