Quotes from Maria Edgeworth

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

Business was his aversion; Pleasure was his business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Besides the bore condescending, who, whether good-natured or ill-natured, is a most provoking animal—there is the bore facetious, an insufferable creature, always laughing, but with whom you can never laugh. And there is another exotic variety—the vive la bagatelle bore of the ape kind—who imitate men of genius. Having early been taught that there is nothing more delightful than the unbending of a great mind, they set about continually to unbend the bow in company.

At ebb time—a time which must come to all, pretty or rich, treasures are discovered upon some shores; or golden sands are seen when the waters run low. In others bare rocks, slime, or reptiles. May I never be at low tide with a bore!

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.

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?

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

Make it a rule, you know, to believe only half the world says.

Women are now so highly cultivated, and political subjects are at present of so much importance, of such high interest, to all human creatures who live together in society, you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it is now, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, "ladies have nothing to do with politics.

Wigs were formerly used instead of brooms in Ireland for sweeping or dusting tables, stairs, etc. The Editor doubted the fact till he saw a labourer of the old school sweep down a flight of stairs with his wig; he afterwards put it on his head again with the utmost composure, and said, 'Oh, please your honour, it's never a bit the worse.

You talk of falling in love as if it were a terrible fall: for my part, I should pity a person much more for falling down stairs.

I can but just recollect having been amused at the Theatres, and the Opera, and the Pantheon, and Ranelagh, and all those places, for their own sakes. Soon, very soon, we go out to see people, not things: then we grow tired of seeing people; then we grow tired of being seen by people; and then we go out merely because we can't stay at home. A dismal story, and a true one.

He] was very ill-used by the Government about a place that was promised him and never given, after his supporting them against his conscience very honourably, and being greatly abused for it, which hurt him greatly, he having the name of a great patriot in the country before.