Maria Edgeworth

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

... an inaccurate use of words produces such a strange confusion in all reasoning, that in the heat of debate, the combatants, unable to distinguish their friends from their foes, fall promiscuously on both.

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

Love occupies a vast space in a woman's thoughts, but fills a small portion in a man's life.

wit is often its own worst enemy.

The labor of thinking was so great to me, that having once come to a conclusion upon any subject, I would rather persist in it, right or wrong, than be at the trouble of going over the process again to revise and rectify my judgment.

We perfectly agreed in our ideas of traveling; we hurried from place to place as fast as horses and wheels, and curses and guineas, could carry us.

[On collectors of quotations:] How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets ...

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

Promises are dangerous things to ask or to give.

half the good intentions of my life have been frustrated by my unfortunate habit of putting things off till to-morrow.

I ... practiced all the arts of apology, evasion, and invisibility, to which procrastinators must sooner or later be reduced.

every man who takes a part in politics, especially in times when parties run high, must expect to be abused; they must bear it; and their friends must learn to bear it for them.

We are all apt to think that an opinion that differs from our own is a prejudice ...

a straight line is the shortest possible line between any two points - an axiom equally true in morals as in mathematics.

First loves are not necessarily more foolish than others; but the chances are certainly against them. Proximity of time or place, a variety of accidental circumstances more than the essential merits of the object, often produce what is called first love.

how impossible it is not to laugh in some company, or to laugh in others.

Justice satisfies everybody.

tyranny and injustice always produce cunning and falsehood.

there is no reasoning with imagination.

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

Hope can produce the finest and most permanent springs of action.

Home! With what different sensations different people pronounce and hear that word pronounced!

Health can make money, but money cannot make health.

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

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.

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

How is it that hope so powerfully excites, and fear so absolutely depresses all our faculties?

when driven to the necessity of explaining, I found that I did not myself understand what I meant.

you've always been living on prospects; for my part, I'd rather have a mole-hill in possession than a mountain in prospect.