Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward Quotes

Quotes about:

• It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Done, Life Is, Undoing

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1878). “The Gates Ajar”

  9 Copy quote

• Imagination is built upon knowledge.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Imagination, Built

  4 Copy quote

• What an immense power over life is the power of possessing distinct aims.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Life Is, Aim, Possessing

  4 Copy quote

• Truth, like climate, is common property.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Truth, Climate, Common

  4 Copy quote

• I believe in women; and in their right to their own best possibilities in every department of life. I believe that the methods ofdress practiced among women are a marked hindrance to the realization of these possibilities, and should be scorned or persuaded out of society.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Fashion, Believe, Realization

  8 Copy quote

• Happiness must be cultivated. It is like character. It is not a thing to be safely let alone for a moment, or it will run to weeds.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Happiness, Running, Weed

  4 Copy quote

• To exist as an advertisement of her husband's income, or her father's generosity, has become a second nature to many a woman who must have undergone, one would say, some long and subtle process of degradation before she sunk [sic] so low, or grovelled so serenely.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Fashion, Husband, Father

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Teacher, Teaching, Ignorance

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Voice, Dresses, Looks

  4 Copy quote

• ... 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Work, Thinking, Way

  4 Copy quote

• Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Music, Air, Purity

  4 Copy quote

• Next to the love between man and his Creator,
  The love of one man and one woman,
  Is the loftiest and the most illusive ideal,
  That has been set before the world.
  A perfect marriage is like a pure heart:
  Those who have it are fit to see God.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Heart, Love Is, Men

  11 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Powerful, Law, Denial

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Life, Motivational, Time

  4 Copy quote

• Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living.... Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Weed, Book, Teaching

  6 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Sympathy, Art, Growth

  4 Copy quote

• A perfect marriage is like a pure heart ... those who have it are fit to see God.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Heart, Perfect, Fit

  7 Copy quote

• The Girl of the Period, sauntering before one down Broadway, is one panorama of awful surprises from top to toe. Her clothes characterize her. She never characterizes her clothes. She is upholstered, not ornamented. She is bundled, not draped. She is puckered, not folded. She struts, she does not sweep. She has not one of the attributes of nature nor of proper art. She neither soothes the eye like a flower, nor pleases it like a picture. She wearies it like a kaleidoscope. She is a meaningless dazzle of broken effects.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Girl, Fashion, Art

  5 Copy quote

• Surely it is one of the requisites of a tasteful garb that the expression of effort to please shall be wanting in it; that the mysteries of the toilet shall not be suggested by it; that the steps to its completion shall be knocked away like the sculptor's ladder from the statue, and the mental force expended upon it be swept away out of sight like the chips on the studio floor.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Fashion, Expression, Sight

  4 Copy quote

• ... it seems to have been my luck to stumble into various forms of progress, to which I have been of the smallest possible use; yet for whose sake I have suffered the discomfort attending all action in moral improvements, without the happiness of knowing that this was clearly quite worth while.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Knowing, Luck, Progress

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Law, Dresses, Attention

  7 Copy quote

• ... life is moral responsibility. Life is several other things, we do not deny. It is beauty, it is joy, it is tragedy, it is comedy, it is psychical and physical pleasure, it is the interplay of a thousand rude or delicate motions and emotions, it is the grimmest and the merriest motley of phantasmagoria that could appeal to the gravest or the maddest brush ever put to palette; but it is steadily and sturdily and always moral responsibility.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Responsibility, Rude, Joy

  4 Copy quote

• Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Condolences, Exquisite, Inquisition

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (1878). “The Gates Ajar”

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Grateful, Enough, Habit

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

  Art, Inspiration, Hard Work

  4 Copy quote

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