Maria Edgeworth Quotes

The law, in our case, seems to make the right; and the very reverse ought to be done - the right should make the law.

Did the Warwickshire militia, who were chiefly artisans, teach the Irish to drink beer, or did they learn from the Irish how to drink whiskey?

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.

Health can make money, but money cannot make health.

There is no moment like the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards: they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence.

Love occupies a vast space in a woman's thoughts, but fills a small portion in a man's life.

So quickly in youth do different and opposite trains of ideas and emotions succeed to each other; and so easy it is, by a timely exercise of reason and self-command, to prevent a fancy from becoming a passion.

How success changes the opinion of men!

When driven to the necessity of explaining, I found that I did not myself understand what I meant.

My mother took too much, a great deal too much, care of me; she over-educated, over-instructed, over-dosed me with premature lessons of prudence: she was so afraid that I should ever do a foolish thing, or not say a wise one, that she prompted my every word, and guided my every action. So I grew up, seeing with her eyes, hearing with her ears, and judging with her understanding, till, at length, it was found out that I had not eyes, ears or understanding of my own.

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.

I find the love of garden grows upon me as I grow older more and more. Shrubs and flowers and such small gay things, that bloom and please and fade and wither and are gone and we care not for them, are refreshing interests, in life, and if we cannot say never fading pleasures, we may say unreproved pleasures and never grieving losses.

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.

The bore is good for promoting sleep; but though he causeth sleep in others, it is uncertain whether he ever sleeps himself; as few can keep awake in his company long enough to see. It is supposed that when he sleeps it is with his mouth open.

There is no reasoning with imagination.

Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality.

Come when you're called; And do as you're bid; Shut the door after you; And you'll never be chid.

[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 ...

Bishop Wilkins prophesied that the time would come when gentlemen, when they were to go on a journey, would call for their wings as regularly as they call for their boots.

No man ever distinguished himself who could not bear to be laughed at.

Now flattery can never do good; twice cursed in the giving and the receiving, it ought to be.

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

Nor elves, nor fays, nor magic charm, Have pow'r, or will, to work us harm; For those who dare the truth to tell, Fays, elves, and fairies, wish them well.

Belinda is not quite so great a philosopher as I imagined.

It sometimes requires courage to fly from danger.

In real friendship the judgment, the genius, the prudence of each party become the common property of both.

Tyranny and injustice always produce cunning and falsehood.

The Irish sometimes make and keep a vow against whiskey; these vows are usually limited to a short time.

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.

We cannot judge either of the feelings or of the characters of men with perfect accuracy from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversations, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real characters.

She saw none of them in their natural state. She asserts that though there may be women distinguished as writers in England, there are no ladies who have any great conversational and political influence in society, of that kind which, during the old regime, was obtained in France by what they would call their femmes marquantes2, such as Madame de Tencin, Madame de Deffand, Mademoiselle de l'Espinasse. This remark stung me to the quick, for my country and for myself, and raised in me a foolish, vainglorious emulation, an ambition false in its objects, and unsuited to the manners, domestic habits, and public virtue of our country. I

Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget.

Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart.

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.

Those who are animated by hope can perform what would seem impossibilities to those who are under the depressing influence of fear.

The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.

If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.

We perfectly agreed in our ideas of traveling; we hurried from place to place as fast as horses and wheels, and curses and guineas, could carry us.

The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors!

Man is to be held only by the slightest chains; with the idea that he can break them at pleasure, he submits to them in sport.

Every man who takes a part in politics, especially in times when parties run high, must expect to be abused; they must bear it; and their friends must learn to bear it for them.

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.

Beauty is a great gift of heaven; not for the purpose of female vanity, but a great gift for one who loves, and wishes to be beloved.

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.

We are all apt to think that an opinion that differs from our own is a prejudice ...

What a misfortune it isto be bornawoman!? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show usthenew limits, the Gothic structure, theimpenetrable barriers of our prison.

Artificial manners vanish the moment the natural passions are touched.

Home! With what different sensations different people pronounce and hear that word pronounced!

What a treasure, to meet with any thing a new heart
all hearts, nowadays, are secondhand at best.

The bore is usually considered a harmless creature, or of that class of irrationa bipeds who hurt only themselves.

There are two sorts of content; one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence. The first is a virtue; the other, a vice.

A man who sells his conscience for his interest will sell it for his pleasure. A man who will betray his country will betray his friend.

Out of forty-nine suits which he had, he never lost one but seventeen; the rest he gained with costs, double costs, treble costs sometimes; but even that did not pay.

Remember, we can judge better by the conduct of people towards others than by their manner towards ourselves.

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

Promises are dangerous things to ask or to give.

Persons not habituated to reason often argue absurdly, because, from particular instances, they deduce general conclusions, and extend the result of their limited experience of individuals indiscriminately to whole classes.

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.

Wit is often its own worst enemy.

Hope can produce the finest and most permanent springs of action.

Those who have lived in a house with spoiled children must have a lively recollection of the degree of torment they can inflict upon all who are within sight or hearing.

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

When a man's over head and shoulders in debt, he may live the faster for it, and the better if he goes the right way about it, or else how is it so many live so well, as we see every day after they are ruined?

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

Business was his aversion; Pleasure was his business.

The labor of thinking was so great to me, that having once come to a conclusion upon any subject, I would rather persist in it, right or wrong, than be at the trouble of going over the process again to revise and rectify my judgment.

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.

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