Mary Augusta Ward Quotes

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

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

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.

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

[T]he better life cannot be imposed from without—it must grow from within.

There is nothing more startling in human relations than the strong emotions of weak people.

This Laodicean cant of tolerance.

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

[M]y credo is very short. Its first article is art—and its second is art—and its third is art!

[T]he delight in natural things—colours, forms, scents—when there was nothing to restrain or hamper it, has often been a kind of intoxication, in which thought and consciousness seemed suspended.

But no man has a monopoly of conscience.

Conviction is the Conscience of the Mind.

All things change,—creeds and philosophies and outward systems,—but God remains!

"Propinquity does it"—as Mrs Thornburgh is always reminding us.

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 go out into the wilderness where all is experiment, and spiritual life begins again.