Mary Augusta Ward Quotations

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

For nine years, till the spring of 1881, we lived in Oxford, in a little house north of the Parks, in what was then the newest quarter of the University town.

Place before your eyes two Precepts, and two only. One is, Preach the Gospel; and the other is--Put down enthusiasm!The Church of England in a nutshell.

The only thing which can keep journalism alive - journalism, which is born of the moment, serves the moment, and, as a rule, dies with the moment - is - again the Stevensonian secret! - charm.

We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realize all they tell us.

Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market.

Do we all become garrulous and confidential as we approach the gates of old age? Is it that we instinctively feel, and cannot help asserting, our one advantage over the younger generation, which has so many over us? - the one advantage of time!

Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament?

the delight in natural things - colors, forms, scents - when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended ...

Nothing ought to be told, I think that does not interest or kindle one's own mind in looking back; it is the only condition on which one can hope to interest or kindle other minds.

But a girl of seventeen is not always thinking of books, especially in the Oxford summer term.

I loved nearly all my teachers; but it was not till I went home to live at Oxford, in 1867, that I awoke intellectually to a hundred interests and influences that begin much earlier nowadays to affect any clever child.

Conviction is the conscience of the mind.

The answer, of course, in the mouth of a Christian teacher is that in Christianity alone is there both present joy and future hope.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

In this choice, as I look back over more than half a century, I can only follow - and trust - the same sort of instinct that one follows in the art of fiction.

We believed that growth through Local Government, and perhaps through some special machinery for bringing the wishes and influence of women of all classes to bear on Parliament, other than the Parliamentary vote, was the real line of progress.

I cannot hope that what I have to say will be very interesting to many.

My grandmother made her home at Fox How under the shelter of the fells, with her four daughters, the youngest of whom was only eight when their father died.

English girls' schools today providing the higher education are, so far as my knowledge goes, worthily representative of that astonishing rise in the intellectual standards of women which has taken place in the last half-century.

But the mind travels far - and mysteriously - in sleep.

Our children, two daughters and a son, were born in 1874, 1876, and 1879.

A life spent largely among books, and in the exercise of a literary profession, has very obvious drawbacks, as a subject-matter, when one comes to write about it.

But no man has a monopoly of conscience.

As far as intellectual training was concerned, my nine years from seven to sixteen were practically wasted.

A modern girls' school, equipped as scores are now equipped throughout the country, was of course not to be found in 1858, when I first became a school boarder, or in 1867, when I ceased to be one.

It is the rank and file - the average woman - for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.

So as the years draw on toward the Biblical limit, the inclination to look back, and to tell some sort of story of what one has seen, grows upon most of us.

City of rest! - as it seems to our modern senses, - how is it possible that so busy, so pitiless and covetous a life as history shows us, should have gone to the making and the fashioning of Venice!

To reconceive the Christ! It is the special task of our age ...

Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.

Customers must be delicately angled for at a safe distance - show yourself too much, and, like trout, they flashed away.

praise is a great tonic, and helps most people to do their best.

The thoughts and opinions of one human being, if they are sincere, must always have an interest for some other human beings. The world is there to think about; and if we have lived, or are living, with any sort of energy, we must have thought about it, and about ourselves in relation to it - thought 'furiously' often. And it is out of the many 'thinkings' of many folk, strong or weak, dull or far-ranging, that thought itself grows.

There is nothing more startling in human relations that the strong emotion of weak people.

... the strictness of to-day may have at any moment to be purchased by the laxity of to-morrow.

we all grow on somebody's grave ...

There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment.

I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.

One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.

All things change, creeds and philosophies and outward systems - but God remains.

my credo is very short. Its first article is art - and its second is art - and its third is art!

I wanted to show how a man of sensitive and noble character, born for religion, comes to throw off the orthodoxies of his day and moment, and to go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.

How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system.

A victim to certain obscure forms of gout, he was in character neither stupid, nor inhuman, but he suffered from the usual drawbacks of his class, - too much money, and too few ideas.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

Learn the lesson of your own pain--learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.

Every man is bound to leave a story better than he found it.