Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Who originated that most exquisite of inquisitions, the condolence system?
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What an immense power over life is the power of possessing distinct aims.
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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.
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I read, with a kind of hopeless envy, histories and legends of people of our craft who "do not write for money." It must be a pleasant experience to be able to cultivate so delicate a class of motives for the privilege of doing one's best to express one's thoughts to people who care for them. Personally, I have yet to breathe the ether of such a transcendent sphere. I am proud to say that I have always been a working woman, and always had to be.
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... 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.
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The rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives, are by no means the saddest.
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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.
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... 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.
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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.
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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.
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The distractions, the exhaustions, the savage noises, the demands of town life, are, for me, mortal enemies to thought, to sleep,and to study; its extremes of squalor and of splendor do not stimulate, but sadden me; certain phases of its society I profoundly value, but would sacrifice them to the heaven of country quiet, if I had to choose between.
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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.
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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.
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Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air.
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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.
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Imagination is built upon knowledge.
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It seems to me that life is always undoing for us something that we have just laboriously done.
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Life is moral responsibility.
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A literary woman's best critic is her husband.
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Truth, like climate, is common property.
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A perfect marriage is like a pure heart ... those who have it are fit to see God.
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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.