Mary Augusta Ward Quotes - Page 2

Nothing ought to be told, I think that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds.

I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.

Place before your eyes two Precepts, and two only. One is, Preach the Gospel; and the other is--Put down enthusiasm!The Church of England in a nutshell.

Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance - show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.

my credo is very short. Its first article is art - and its second is art - and its third is art!

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

Conviction is the conscience of the mind.

The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with any sort of energy, we must have thought about it, and about ourselves in relation to it - thought 'furiously' often. And it is out of the many 'thinkings' of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that thought itself grows.

Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one.

As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died.

I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very interesting to many.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.