Top Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward Biography

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward (August 31, 1844 – January 28, 1911) was an early feminist American author and intellectual who challenged traditional Christian beliefs of the afterlife, challenged women's traditional roles in marriage and family, and advocated clothing reform for women.

Read about Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward Quotes

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.

Fit, Heart, Ideal, Love Is, Men

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.

Exist, Fashion, Father, Husband, Nature, Undergone

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

Condolences, Exquisite, Inquisition, Originated, System

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.

Book, Cake, Climb, Land, Teaching, Weed

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.

Art, Backward, Comprehension, Disordered, Growth, Sympathy

A literary woman's best critic is her husband.

Critic, Husband, Literary, Marriage, Women

The literary artist will. . . portray what he knows, and little else. Imagination is built upon knowledge, and his dreams will rest upon his facts. He is worth to the world just about what he has learned from it, and no more.

Artist, Dream, Imagination, Knowledge, Literary, Portray

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.

Case, Denial, Forces, Law, Powerful

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

Done, Laboriously, Life, Life Is, Undoing

Truth, like climate, is common property.

Climate, Common, Property, Truth

I can remember no time when I did not understand that my mother must write books because people would have and read them; but I cannot remember one hour in which her children needed her and did not find her.

Book, Children, Hour, Mother, Time, Understand

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.

Country, Heaven, Sacrifice, Sadden, Savage, Sleep

Life is moral responsibility.

Life, Life Is, Moral, Responsibility

The rainiest nights, like the rainiest lives, are by no means the saddest.

Like, Lives, Mean, Night, Saddest

. . . 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.

Knowing, Luck, Moral, Possible, Progress

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.

Attention, Dress, Dresses, Law, Taste, Wearer

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.

Alone, Happiness, Run, Running, Safely, Weed

. . . 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.

Comedy, Deny, Joy, Moral, Responsibility, Rude

Superior music is purity itself; it clears the air.

Air, Music, Purity, Superior

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.

Becomes, Dignity, Impossible, Impossible To Forget, Sense, World

1