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
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.
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.
We are all apt to think that an opinion that differs from our own is a prejudice ...
Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age; last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as I ever had in my life.
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.
you've always been living on prospects; for my part, I'd rather have a mole-hill in possession than a mountain in prospect.
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.