Mary Augusta Ward Quotes

Nature was here a series of wonders, and a fund of delight.

There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice.

All my life through, the new sights of Nature made me rejoice like a child.

Anne reveled in the world of color about her. "Oh, Marilla," she exclaimed one Saturday morning, coming dancing in with her arms full of gorgeous boughs, "I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn't it? Look at these maple branches. Don't they give you a thrill--several thrills?

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore.

I found every breath of air, and every scent, and every flower and leaf and blade of grass and every passing cloud, and everything in nature, more beautiful and wonderful to me than I had ever found it yet. This was my first gain from my illness. How little I had lost, when the wide world was so full of delight for me.

Color which, like music, is a matter of vibrations, reaches what is most general and therefore most indefinable in nature: its inner power.

It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

To feel beauty is a better thing than to understand how we come to feel it. To have imagination and taste, to love the best, to be carried by the contemplation of nature to a vivid faith in the ideal, all this is more, a great deal more, than any science can hope to be.

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin , or even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.

We were made to enjoy music, to enjoy beautiful sunsets, to enjoy looking at the billows of the sea and to be thrilled with a rose that is bedecked with dew… Human beings are actually created for the transcendent, for the sublime, for the beautiful, for the truthful... and all of us are given the task of trying to make this world a little more hospitable to these beautiful things.

Flowers really do intoxicate me.

We become intoxicated with color, with words that speak of color, and with the sun that makes colors brighter.

Let me enjoy the earth no less because the all-enacting light that fashioned forth its loveliness had other aims than my delight.

The end-purpose of all art is enjoyment!

That's what was wrong with drinking too much. You became immune to drunken delights. There was no solace in liquor. Before you got happy, you collapsed.

This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from men, not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle: it has become a fairy tale.

The sky was pure opal now.

Everyone wants to understand art. Why don't we try to understand the song of a bird? Why do we love the night, the flowers, everything around us, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting, people think they have to understand.

Architecture begins to matter when it brings delight and sadness and perplexity and awe along with a roof over our heads.

Lizards of every temper, style, and color dwell here, seemingly as happy and companionable as the birds and squirrels.

Green is the fresh emblem of well founded hopes. In blue the spirit can wander, but in green it can rest.

I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.

I love ice, when I was in Antarctica many decades ago, I got to see a lot of ice. And the one thing that impressed me -because I love to talk about ice - is that it has a color.

States of profound happiness, like all other forms of intoxication, are apt to befuddle the wits; intense enjoyment of the present always makes one forget the past.