Happy Birthday Maria Edgeworth!

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

I've a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die.

When people are warm, they cannot stand picking terms.

An orator is the worse person to tell a plain fact.

When a man's over head and shoulders in debt, he may live the faster for it, and the better if he goes the right way about it, or else how is it so many live so well, as we see every day after they are ruined?

Surely it is much more generous to forgive and remember, than to forgive and forget.

The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors!

Some people talk of morality, and some of religion, but give me a little snug property.

It is sometimes fortunate, that the means which are taken to produce certain effects upon the mind have a tendency directly opposite to what is expected.

How success changes the opinion of men! 

Business was his aversion; Pleasure was his business. 

The law, in our case, seems to make the right; and the very reverse ought to be done - the right should make the law.

What a treasure, to meet with any thing a new heart-- all hearts, nowadays, are secondhand at best.

The human heart, at whatever age, opens only to the heart that opens in return.

Remember, we can judge better by the conduct of people towards others than by their manner towards ourselves.

The bore is usually considered a harmless creature, or of that class of irrationa bipeds who hurt only themselves.

So quickly in youth do different and opposite trains of ideas and emotions succeed to each other; and so easy it is, by a timely exercise of reason and self-command, to prevent a fancy from becoming a passion.

Fortune's wheel never stands still the highest point is therefore the most perilous.

If we take care of the moments, the years will take care of themselves.

Irish blunders are never blunders of the heart. 

Clarence Hervey might have been more than a pleasant young man, if he had not been smitten with the desire of being thought superior in every thing, and of being the most admired person in all companies. He had been early flattered with the idea that he was a man of genius; and he imagined that, as such, he was entitled to be imprudent, wild, and eccentric. He affected singularity, in order to establish his claims to genius. He had considerable literary talents, by which he was distinguished at Oxford; but he was so dreadfully afraid of passing for a pedant, that when he came into the company of the idle and the ignorant, he pretended to disdain every species of knowledge. His chameleon character seemed to vary in different lights, and according to the different situations in which he happened to be placed. He could be all things to all men—and to all women.