Top 70 Maria Edgeworth Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We may make our future by the best use of the present. There is no moment like the present.”

— Maria Edgeworth

2. “Those who are animated by hope can perform what would seem impossibilities to those who are under the depressing influence of fear.”

— Maria Edgeworth

3. “If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.”

— Maria Edgeworth

4. “Health can make money, but money cannot make health.”

— Maria Edgeworth

5. “Confidence is the best proof of love.”

— Maria Edgeworth

6. “Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget.”

— Maria Edgeworth

7. “Nature knows best, and she says, roar!”

— Maria Edgeworth

8. “I’ve a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die.”

— Maria Edgeworth

9. “Nature’s hasty conscience.”

— Maria Edgeworth

10. “The bore is usually considered a harmless creature, or of that class of irrationa bipeds who hurt only themselves.”

— Maria Edgeworth

11. “It sometimes requires courage to fly from danger.”

— Maria Edgeworth

12. “It is not so easy to do good as those who have never attempted it may imagine.”

— Maria Edgeworth

13. “There is no moment like the present. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards: they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence.”

— Maria Edgeworth

14. “The human heart, at whatever age, opens to the heart that opens in return.”

— Maria Edgeworth

15. “According to the Asiatics, Cupid’s bow is strung with bees which are apt to sting, sometimes fatally, those who meddle with it.”

— Maria Edgeworth

16. “Did the Warwickshire militia, who were chiefly artisans, teach the Irish to drink beer, or did they learn from the Irish how to drink whiskey?”

— Maria Edgeworth

17. “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.”

— Maria Edgeworth

18. “Nor elves, nor fays, nor magic charm, Have pow’r, or will, to work us harm; For those who dare the truth to tell, Fays, elves, and fairies, wish them well.”

— Maria Edgeworth

19. “In real friendship the judgment, the genius, the prudence of each party become the common property of both.”

— Maria Edgeworth

20. “Beauty is a great gift of heaven; not for the purpose of female vanity, but a great gift for one who loves, and wishes to be beloved.”

— Maria Edgeworth

21. “Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.”

— Maria Edgeworth

22. “It is sometimes fortunate, that the means which are taken to produce certain effects upon the mind have a tendency directly opposite to what is expected.”

— Maria Edgeworth

23. “What a misfortune it isto be bornawoman!? 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 usthenew limits, the Gothic structure, theimpenetrable barriers of our prison.”

— Maria Edgeworth

24. “How success changes the opinion of men!”

— Maria Edgeworth

25. “Love occupies a vast space in a woman’s thoughts, but fills a small portion in a man’s life.”

— Maria Edgeworth

26. “Now flattery can never do good; twice cursed in the giving and the receiving, it ought to be.”

— Maria Edgeworth

27. “When a man’s over head and shoulders in debt, he may live the faster for it, and the better if he goes the right way about it, or else how is it so many live so well, as we see every day after they are ruined?”

— Maria Edgeworth

28. “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.”

— Maria Edgeworth

29. “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

30. “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

31. “Artificial manners vanish the moment the natural passions are touched.”

— Maria Edgeworth

32. “Obtain power, then, by all means; power is the law of man; make it yours.”

— Maria Edgeworth

33. “Habit is, to weak minds, a species of moral predestination, from which they have no power to escape.”

— Maria Edgeworth

34. “Women are now so highly cultivated, and political subjects are at present of so much importance, of such high interest, to all human creatures who live together in society, you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it is now, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, “ladies have nothing to do with politics.”

— Maria Edgeworth

35. “The everlasting quotation-lover dotes on the husks of learning.”

— Maria Edgeworth

36. “Bishop Wilkins prophesied that the time would come when gentlemen, when they were to go on a journey, would call for their wings as regularly as they call for their boots.”

— Maria Edgeworth

37. “Promises are dangerous things to ask or to give.”

— Maria Edgeworth

38. “The bore is good for promoting sleep; but though he causeth sleep in others, it is uncertain whether he ever sleeps himself; as few can keep awake in his company long enough to see. It is supposed that when he sleeps it is with his mouth open.”

— Maria Edgeworth

39. “Persons not habituated to reason often argue absurdly, because, from particular instances, they deduce general conclusions, and extend the result of their limited experience of individuals indiscriminately to whole classes.”

— Maria Edgeworth

40. “Let the sexes mutually forgive each other their follies; or, what is much better, let them combine their talents for their general advantage.”

— Maria Edgeworth

41. “The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous.”

— Maria Edgeworth

42. “Idleness, ennui, noise, mischief, riot, and a nameless train of mistaken notions of pleasure, are often classed, in a young man’s mind, under the general head of liberty.”

— Maria Edgeworth

43. “If young women were not deceived into a belief that affectation pleases, they would scarcely trouble themselves to practise it so much.”

— Maria Edgeworth

44. “At ebb time – a time which must come to all, pretty or rich, treasures are discovered upon some shores; or golden sands are seen when the waters run low. In others bare rocks, slime, or reptiles. May I never be at low tide with a bore!”

— Maria Edgeworth

45. “Come when you’re called; And do as you’re bid; Shut the door after you; And you’ll never be chid.”

— Maria Edgeworth

46. “Fortune’s wheel never stands still the highest point is therefore the most perilous.”

— Maria Edgeworth

47. “Illness was a sort of occupation to me, and I was always sorry to get well.”

— Maria Edgeworth

48. “There are two sorts of content; one is connected with exertion, the other with habits of indolence. The first is a virtue; the other, a vice.”

— Maria Edgeworth

49. “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.”

— Maria Edgeworth

50. “An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.”

— Maria Edgeworth