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
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.
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.
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.
Man is to be held only by the slightest chains; with the idea that he can break them at pleasure, he submits to them in sport.
How success changes the opinion of men!
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.
Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man's mind, under the general head of liberty.
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.
No man ever distinguished himself who could not bear to be laughed at.
Love occupies a vast space in a woman's thoughts, but fills a small portion in a man's life.
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.