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The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.
— Maria Edgeworth
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ME
Maria Edgeworth
essayist, novelist, children's writer, writer
1768 – 1849
Maria Edgeworth was an Anglo-Irish novelist of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe. She held critical views on estate management, politics, and education, and corresponded with some of the leading literary and economic writers, including Sir Walter Scott and David Ricardo. During the first decade of the 19th century she was one of the most widely read novelists in Britain and Ireland. Her name today is most commonly associated with Castle Rackrent, her first novel, in which she, while Anglican herself, used the voice of an Irish Catholic character to narrate the dissipation and decline of a family from her own landed Anglo-Irish class.
All Quotes by Maria Edgeworth
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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.
— Maria Edgeworth
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Obtain power, then, by all means; power is the law of man; make it yours.
— Maria Edgeworth
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Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget.
— Maria Edgeworth
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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.
— Maria Edgeworth
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A love-match was the only thing for happiness, where the parties could any way afford it.
— Maria Edgeworth
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Our Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart.
— Maria Edgeworth
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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.
— Maria Edgeworth
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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.
— Maria Edgeworth
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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.
— Maria Edgeworth
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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.
— Maria Edgeworth
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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.
— Maria Edgeworth