Maria Edgeworth Quotes & Sayings

Confidence is the best proof of love. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

Let menot, even inmyownmind, committheinjustice of taking a speck for the whole. — Maria Edgeworth

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! — Maria Edgeworth

According to the Asiatics, Cupid's bow is strung with bees which are apt to sting, sometimes fatally, those who meddle with it. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms. — Maria Edgeworth

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

Wit is often its own worst enemy. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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

How success changes the opinion of men! — Maria Edgeworth

Beauties are always curious about beauties, and wits about wits. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

Clarence Hervey might have been more than a pleasant young man, if he had not been smitten with the desire of being thought superior in every thing, and of being the most admired person in all companies. He had been early flattered with the idea that he was a man of genius; and he imagined that, as such, he was entitled to be imprudent, wild, and eccentric. He affected singularity, in order to establish his claims to genius. He had considerable literary talents, by which he was distinguished at Oxford; but he was so dreadfully afraid of passing for a pedant, that when he came into the company of the idle and the ignorant, he pretended to disdain every species of knowledge. His chameleon character seemed to vary in different lights, and according to the different situations in which he happened to be placed. He could be all things to all men - and to all women. — Maria Edgeworth

Nature knows best, and she says, roar! — Maria Edgeworth

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? — Maria Edgeworth

Promises are dangerous things to ask or to give. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

First loves are not necessarily more foolish than others; but the chances are certainly against them. Proximity of time or place, a variety of accidental circumstances more than the essential merits of the object, often produce what is called first love. — Maria Edgeworth

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

How impossible it is not to laugh in some company, or to laugh in others. — Maria Edgeworth

Possessed, as are all the fair daughters of Eve, of an hereditary propensity, transmitted to them undiminished through succeeding generations, to be 'soonmoved withtheslightesttouch of blame'; very little precept and practice will confirm them in the habit, and instruct them all the maxims, of self-justification. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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 — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

Business was his aversion; Pleasure was his business. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

Health can make money, but money cannot make health. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

Obtain power, then, by all means; power is the law of man; make it yours. — Maria Edgeworth

Fortune's wheel never stands still the highest point is therefore the most perilous. — Maria Edgeworth

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

I ... practiced all the arts of apology, evasion, and invisibility, to which procrastinators must sooner or later be reduced. — Maria Edgeworth

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

Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape. — Maria Edgeworth

It is not so easy to do good as those who have never attempted it may imagine. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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. — Maria Edgeworth

First and foremost, they had the curses of the country: and Sir Murtagh Rackrent, the new heir, in the next place, on account of this affront to the body, refused to pay a shilling of the debts, in which he was countenanced by all the best gentlemen of property, and others of his acquaintance; Sir Murtagh alleging in all companies that he all along meant to pay his father's debts of honour, but the moment the law was taken of him, there was an end of honour to be sure. It was whispered (but none but the enemies of the family believe it) that this was all a sham seizure to get quit of the debts which he had bound himself to pay in honour. — Maria Edgeworth

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

Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

Tyranny and injustice always produce cunning and falsehood. — Maria Edgeworth

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? — Maria Edgeworth

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

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

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

But don't you know that girls never think of what they are talking about, or rather never talk of what they are thinking about? And they have always ten times more to say to the man they don't care for, than to him they do. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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

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. — Maria Edgeworth

Thady begins his memoirs of the Rackrent Family by dating MONDAY MORNING, because no great undertaking can be auspiciously commenced in Ireland on any morning but MONDAY MORNING. 'Oh, please God we live till Monday morning, we'll set the slater to mend the roof of the house. On Monday morning we'll fall to, and cut the turf. On Monday morning we'll see and begin mowing. On Monday morning, please your honour, we'll begin and dig the potatoes,' etc.
All the intermediate days, between the making of such speeches and the ensuing Monday, are wasted: and when Monday morning comes, it is ten to one that the business is deferred to THE NEXT Monday morning. The Editor knew a gentleman, who, to counteract this prejudice, made his workmen and labourers begin all new pieces of work upon a Saturday. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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

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

We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present. — Maria Edgeworth

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

You've always been living on prospects; for my part, I'd rather have a mole-hill in possession than a mountain in prospect. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

Half the good intentions of my life have been frustrated by my unfortunate habit of putting things off till to-morrow. — Maria Edgeworth

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

The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous. — Maria Edgeworth

There is no reasoning with imagination. — Maria Edgeworth

Illness was a sort of occupation to me, and I was always sorry to get well. — Maria Edgeworth

If young women were not deceived into a belief that affectation pleases, they would scarcely trouble themselves to practise it so much. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

It sometimes requires courage to fly from danger. — Maria Edgeworth

Artificial manners vanish the moment the natural passions are touched. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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

A love-match was the only thing for happiness, where the parties could any way afford it. — Maria Edgeworth

[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 ... — Maria Edgeworth

It is sometimes fortunate, that the means which are taken to produce certain effects upon the mind have a tendency directly opposite to what is expected. — Maria Edgeworth

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

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. — Maria Edgeworth

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. — Maria Edgeworth