Mary Russell Mitford Quotes

[On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] Her sweetness of character is even beyond her genius.

A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of waxwork.

Prejudices of taste, likings and dislikings, are not always vanquishable by reason.

She was the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly ever.

[On Elizabeth Barrett Browning:] ... for finish, and melody of versification, there is nothing approaching to Miss Barrett in this day, or in any other - also for diction. Her words paint.

I do not think very highly of Madame D'Arblay's books. The style is so strutting. She does so stalk about on Dr. Johnson's old stilts.

Our English people are much addicted to raising idols, and then revenging themselves on their own idolatry by knocking down and demolishing the poor bits of wood and stone that they had worshipped as gods. How many literary reputations have been so treated!

Well, great authors are great people - but I believe that they are best seen at a distance.

I prepare myself for all disappointments by expecting nothing.

I foresee that the Andersen and Fairy Tale fashion will not last; none of these things away from general nature do.

Does it not appear to you versatility is the true and rare characteristic of that rare thing called genius-versatility and playfulness? In my mind they are both essential.

Fashion is a capricious deity.

We may admire people for being wise, but we like them best when they are foolish.

Enthusiasm is very catching, especially when it is very eloquent.

In our present high state of civilization, people are so much alike, that anything at all odd comes on one with the freshness and character of an antique coin among smooth shillings.

I have discovered that our great favourite, Miss Austen, is my countrywoman...with whom mamma before her marriage was acquainted. Mamma says that she was then the prettiest, silliest, most affected, husband-hunting butterfly she ever remembers...

The power of admiring whatever is deserving of admiration, the nice and quick perception of the beautiful and the true, is one of the highest and noblest of our faculties, born of taste, and knowledge, and wisdom, or rather it is taste, and wisdom, and knowledge, in one rare and great combination.

Friendship is the bread of the heart.

Trees and children are, of all living things, those whose growth soonest makes one feel one's age.

... they know little of the passions who seek to argue with that most intractable of them all, the fear that is born of love.

The slightest emotion of disinterested kindness that passes through the mind improves and refreshes that mind, producing generous thought and noble feeling, as the sun and rain foster your favourite flowers. Cherish kind wishes, my children; for a time may come when you may be enabled to put them in practice.

That bad letters of every kind arise from want of the habit of thinking, I cannot doubt.

Autumn glows upon us like a splendid evening; it is the very sunset of the year.

I detest so much ... those persons, who insist upon telling you everything - who labor every point, as the lawyers say, as if they thought all excellence consisted in length.

I have had a great misfortune; my dear old dog is dead.

Buonaparte is certainly writing, or rather dictating, his memoirs. He walks backwards and forwards with his hands behind him, and dictates so fast that two or three of his suite are obliged to be in attendance, that the one may take down one-half of a sentence, and another the rest; they then literally compare notes, and put the disjointed legs and wings and heads of periods together. This is writing a book as he fought a battle.

I have still the best comforts of life - books and friendships - and I trust never to lose my relish for either.

To think of playing cricket for hard cash! Money and gentility would ruin any pastime under the sun.

Nothing so pretty to look at as my garden!

No fear of forgetting the good-humoured faces that meet us in our walks each day.

I place flowers in the very first rank of simple pleasures; and I have no very good opinion of the hard worldly people who take no delight in them.

There is no running away from a great grief.