Top 35 Mary Augusta Ward Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

3. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

4. “It is the rank and file – the average woman – for whom the world has opened up so astonishingly.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

6. “Conviction is the conscience of the mind.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

8. “All things change, creeds and philosophies and outward systems – but God remains.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

10. “But no man has a monopoly of conscience.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

11. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

12. “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

13. “Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament?”

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

16. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

18. “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!”

— Mary Augusta Ward

19. “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

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

21. “One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

23. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

27. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

28. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

29. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

30. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

31. “But the mind travels far – and mysteriously – in sleep.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

32. “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

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

34. “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!”

— Mary Augusta Ward

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

— Mary Augusta Ward

36. “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.”

— Mary Augusta Ward

37. “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

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

— Mary Augusta Ward