Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworthwas a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held advanced views, for a woman of her time, on estate management, politics and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth1 January 1767
CountryIreland
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.
Business was his pleasure; pleasure was his business.
Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart.
... 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.
Home! With what different sensations different people pronounce and hear that word pronounced!
Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape.
Now flattery can never do good; twice cursed in the giving and the receiving, it ought to be.
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.
Let menot, even inmyownmind, committheinjustice of taking a speck for the whole.
Come when you're called; And do as you're bid; Shut the door after you; And you'll never be chid.
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?
Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality.
Obtain power, then, by all means; power is the law of man; make it yours.
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.