Maria Edgeworth (1768 – 1849)
Popular and influential Anglo-Irish novelist, short-story writer and educationalist.
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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 love-match was the only thing for happiness, where the parties could any way afford it.
To our unhappy sex genius and sensibility are the most treacherous gifts of Heaven. Why should we cultivate talents merely to gratify the caprice of tyrants? Why seek for knowledge, which can prove only that our wretchedness is irremediable? If a ray of light break in upon us, it is but to make darkness more visible; to show us the narrow limits, the Gothic structure, the impenetrable barriers of our prison.
It is unjust and absurd of those advancing in years, to expect of the young that confidence should come all and only on their side: the human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.
Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget.
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.
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.
Obtain power, then, by all means; power is the law of man; make it yours.
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.
Alarmed successively by every fashionable medical terror of the day, she dosed her children with every specific which was publicly advertised or privately recommended…The consequence was, that the dangers, which had at first been imaginary, became real: these little victims of domestic medicine never had a day's health: they looked, and were, more dead than alive.
Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart.
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