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The screech-owl, with ill-boding cry, Portends strange things, old women say Stops every fool that passes by, And frights the school-boy from his play.

Mary Wortley Montagu

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Mary Wortley Montagu
Age: 73 †
Born: 1689
Born: January 1
Died: 1762
Died: August 21
Editor
Explorer
Playwright
Poet
Writer
Lady Mary Pierrepont
Mary Pierrepont
Mary Wortley Montagu
Play
Passes
Every
Ill
Things
Cry
Fool
Boys
Screech
Strange
Owl
School
Fright
Women
Stops

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No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting. She will not want new fashions nor regret the loss of expensive diversions or variety of company if she can be amused with an author in her closet.
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people never write calmly but when they write indifferently.
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Making verses is almost as common as taking snuff, and God can tell what miserable stuff people carry about in their pockets, and offer to all their acquaintances, and you know one cannot refuse reading and taking a pinch.
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General notions are generally wrong.
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The use of knowledge in our sex (beside the amusement of solitude) is to moderate the passions and learn to be contented with a small expense, which are the certain effects of a studious life and, it may be, preferable even to that fame which men have engrossed to themselves and will not suffer us to share.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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I have all my life been on my guard against the information conveyed by the sense of hearing -- it being one of my earliest observations, the universal inclination of humankind is to be led by the ears, and I am sometimes apt to imagine that they are given to men as they are to pitchers, purposely that they may be carried about by them.
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Lord Bacon makes beauty to consist of grace and motion.
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As I approach a second childhood, I endeavor to enter into the pleasures of it.
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It has all been most interesting.
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I have never had any great esteem for the generality of the fair sex, and my only consolation for being of that gender has been the assurance it gave me of never being married to any one among them.
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There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.
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Begin nothing without considering what the end may be.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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Take back the beauty and wit you bestow upon me leave me my own mediocrity of agreeableness and genius, but leave me also my sincerity, my constancy, and my plain dealing 'Tis all I have to recommend me to the esteem either of others or myself.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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... if it were the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observed.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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No modest man ever did or ever will make a fortune.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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Nobody should trust their virtue with necessity, the force of which is never known till it is felt, and it is therefore one of the first duties to avoid the temptation of it.
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To always be loved one must ever be agreeable.
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We are educated in the grossest ignorance, and no art omitted to stifle our natural reason if some few get above their nurses instructions, our knowledge must rest concealed and be as useless to the world as gold in the mine.
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A propos of Distempers, I am going to tell you a thing that I am sure will make you wish your selfe here. The Small Pox so fatal and so general amongst us is here entirely harmless by the invention of engrafting (which is the term they give it). There is a set of old Women who make it their business to perform the Operation.
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Satire should, like a polished razor keen, Wound with a touch that's scarcely felt or seen.
Mary Wortley Montagu