Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward Quotes
A great idea is usually original to more than one discoverer. Great ideas come when the world needs them. Great ideas surround the world's ignorance and press for admission.
It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.
Out of my discomforts, which were small enough, grew one thing for which I have all my life been grateful, the formation of fixed habits of work.
The great law of denial belongs to the powerful forces of life, whether the case be one of coolish baked beans, or an unrequited affection.
Surely it is one of the simplest laws of taste in dress, that it shall not attract undue attention from the wearer to the worn.
A perfect marriage is like a pure heart ... those who have it are fit to see God.
It is not the straining for great things that is most effective; it is the doing the little things, the common duties, a little better and better.
What an immense power over life is the power of possessing distinct aims.
A good short story is a work of art which daunts us in proportion to its brevity.... No inspiration is too noble for it; no amountof hard work is too severe for it.
It is impossible to forget the sense of dignity which marks the hour when one becomes a wage-earner... I felt that I had suddenly acquired value to myself, to my family, and to the world.
Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?
It is not in our drawing-rooms that we should look to judge of the intrinsic worth of any style of dress. The street-car is a truer crucible of its inherent value.
The rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives, are by no means the saddest.
The woman's personal identity is a vast undiscovered country -- with which Society has yet to acquaint itself, and by which it is yet to be revolutionized.
It is in the comprehension of the physically disabled, or disordered ... that we are behind our age.... sympathy as a fine art is backward in the growth of progress.
... to work, to work hard, to see work steadily, and see it whole, was the way to be reputable. I think I always respected a goodblacksmith more than a lady of leisure.
What an immense power over the life is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motion of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason.
