Mary Augusta Ward

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

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

"One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else."

"This Laodicean cant of tolerance."

"There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes opposition a torment."

"Place before your eyes two precepts, and two only. One is, Preach the Gospel; and the other is—Put down enthusiasm! […] — the Church of England in a nutshell."

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

"Conviction is the Conscience of the Mind."

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

"Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system!"

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

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

"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!"

"We enjoy the great prophets of literature most when we have not yet lived enough to realise all they tell us."

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

"Is there any other slavery and chain like that of temperament?"

"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."

"[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 the mind travels far—and mysteriously—in sleep."

"But no man has a monopoly of conscience."

"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."

"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."