Maria Edgeworth Quotes

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Maria Edgeworth

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

— Maria Edgeworth

“Business was his aversion; Pleasure was his business.”

— 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

“A love-match was the only thing for happiness, where the parties could any way afford it.”

— Maria Edgeworth

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

— 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

“Wit is often its own worst enemy.”

— 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

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

— 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

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

— Maria Edgeworth

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

— Maria Edgeworth

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

“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

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

— 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

“How impossible it is not to laugh in some company, or to laugh in others.”

— Maria Edgeworth

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

— 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

“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

“The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous.”

— 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

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

— Maria Edgeworth

“Nature knows best, and she says, roar!”

— Maria Edgeworth

“Artificial manners vanish the moment the natural passions are touched.”

— 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

“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

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

“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

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

“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

“Confidence is the best proof of love.”

— Maria Edgeworth

“Obtain power, then, by all means; power is the law of man; make it yours.”

— 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

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

“Health can make money, but money cannot make health.”

— Maria Edgeworth

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

— Maria Edgeworth

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

— Maria Edgeworth