Maria Edgeworth Quotes

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

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

Confidence is the best proof of love.

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

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

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.

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.

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 to the heart that opens in return.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

there is no reasoning with imagination.

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

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

Business was his aversion; Pleasure was his business.

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

tyranny and injustice always produce cunning and falsehood.

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.

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

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?

how impossible it is not to laugh in some company, or to laugh in others.

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

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

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

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

... 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.

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

Promises are dangerous things to ask or to give.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

wit is often its own worst enemy.

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.