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Muse, time has taught me that all metaphysical systems, even historical facts given as truths, are hardly that, so I amuse myself with more agreeable lies I no longer read anything but novels.

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
Even
Novel
Metaphysical
Time
Longer
Muse
Taught
Novels
Lying
Truths
Read
Hardly
Given
Systems
Facts
Historical
Amuse
Anything
Lies
Agreeable

More quotes by 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.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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People are never so near playing the fool as when they think themselves wise.
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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Gardening is certainly the next amusement to reading.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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People commonly educate their children as they build their houses, according to some plan they think beautiful, without considering whether it is suited to the purposes for which they are designed.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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Strictly speaking, there is but one real evil: I mean acute pain. All other complaints are so considerably diminished by time that it is plain the grief is owing to our passion, since the sensation of it vanishes when that is over.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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The ultimate end of your education was to make you a good wife.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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The most romantic region of every country is that where the mountains unite themselves with the plains or lowlands.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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In short I will part with anything for you but you.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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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.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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We should ask, not who is the most learned, but who is the best learned.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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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.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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To always be loved one must ever be agreeable.
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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Nature has not placed us in an inferior rank to men, no more than the females of other animals, where we see no distinction of capacity, though I am persuaded if there was a commonwealth of rational horses... it would be an established maxim amongst them that a mare could not be taught to pace.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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We are apt to consider Shakespeare only as a poet but he was certainly one of the greatest moral philosophers that ever lived.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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The pretty fellows you speak of, I own entertain me sometimes, but is it impossible to be diverted with what one despises? I can laugh at a puppet show, at the same time I know there is nothing in it worth my attention or regard.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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It was formerly a terrifying view to me that I should one day be an old woman. I now find that Nature has provided pleasures for every state.
Mary Wortley Montagu
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Only a mother knows a mother's fondness.
Mary Wortley Montagu