Mary Augusta Ward Quotes

29 Sourced Quotes

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.

Mary Augusta Ward
Her mind was like a stretch of wet sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally fugitive.

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

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

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

Mary Augusta Ward
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.

Mary Augusta Ward
'One might have seen it with half an eye from the beginning.' Mrs. Thornbrugh had not seen it with two eyes, as we know, till it was pointed out to her; but her imagination worked with equal liveliness backwards or forwards.

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

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

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

Mary Augusta Ward
It is a great thing to be persuaded that at bottom you have a good heart. Lady Charlotte was so persuaded, and allowed herself many things in consequence.

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

Mary Augusta Ward
Dr. Meyrick, who though glad to talk, was also quite content, apparently, to judge from the radiant placidity of his look, to examine his wine, study his menu, and enjoy his entrées in silence, undisturbed by the uncertain pleasures of conversation.

Mary Augusta Ward
My credo is very short. Its first article is art — and its second is art — and its third is art!

Mary Augusta Ward
All things change, creeds and philosophies and outward systems — but God remains.

Mary Augusta Ward
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!

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

Mary Augusta Ward
Her audience looked on at first with the embarrassed or hostile air which is the Englishman's natural protection against the great things of art...

Mary Augusta Ward
I'd as soon hear a bird-clapper preach as him — theer'd be more sense an' less noise!

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

Mary Augusta Ward
There were gulfs between them — gulfs which, as it seemed to him, in a miserable insight, could never be bridged again. Oh, the frightful separateness of experience!

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

Mary Augusta Ward
Praise is a great tonic, and helps most people to do their best.

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

Mary Augusta Ward
The better life cannot be imposed from without — it must grow from within.

Mary Augusta Ward
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.

Mary Augusta Ward
He was in that young morbid state when the mind hangs its own cloud over the universe.

Mary Augusta Ward
One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.

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

Mary Augusta Ward