Julia McNair Wright quotes:

little every-day courtesies are called the small change of life; but we should be badly off in trade if we had no small change, and must always deal with twenty-dollar bills; while the small change mounts up to the great sum in a lifetime.

What is true of the individual will be true of the whole family; what is true of the family will be true of the community, and of the state.

What! nothing grand and noble to be admired, obeyed, copied? Ah, the lack is not without you, but within you!

it is always easier to see the beginning from the end, than the end from the beginning.

fully half of Household miseries arise from a lack of order.

Half a loaf is better than no bread.

A good home owes it, as an expression of thankfulness for its own happiness, to try and make up something of the lack that is in other homes.

Bustle, Sophronia, is not industry, as you very well know; people flutter and bustle about like a hen raising ducks, and then complain that their work has killed them, when it was the fuss that was the killing cause.

Home is the place where true politeness tells.

Plenty of sunshine is the very wine of life.

For national and social disasters, for moral and financial evils, the cure begins in the Household.

Reaching toward perfection in any one thing should lift us higher in all things; it should beget a habit of application and thoroughness.

... there can be no real beauty without neatness and order.

The mind is a phonograph which shall keep and echo the impressions of the past.

Every home has its influences, for good or evil, upon humanity at large.

the less you respect, the less respectable you are; the less you honor, the less in you is to be honored. There are those 'whom not to know argues one's self unknown,' so if you have no reverence in a world where there is so much that is noble and venerable, then there will be something terrible lacking in your own character.

true courtesy ... is real kindness kindly expressed.

simplicity is a thing beautiful in itself, like clear light.

as all clocks need winding, so all human brains and bodies need to be wound up by sleeping.

If people could only be taught that economy is a thing of littles and of individuals, and of every day, and not a thing of masses and of spasmodic efforts, then a true idea would begin to tell upon the habits of our domestic life, for the thrift and thriving of the individual is the thrift and thriving of the nation.

I don't lose an hour in the morning and expect to make it up in the evening; night is the wrong end of the day to borrow from ...

our contempt of wealth does not extend beyond the hour when we can get it in possession.

disorder is the slowest worker in the universe.

Nothing so breaks the spirit as a load of debt.

We do not take much warning of our own mortality in seeing others die, nor of our own weakness in seeing others break down: we think we feel the springs of life stronger in us.

Books form in us habits of thought which shall live forever with us.

The grossest form of this injury of the body to ornament it, is in tattooing. Next, the piercing the ear all around its rim, piercing the nose and the lips to introduce rings or bars of jewelry ...

I hope the day will come when a wasp-waist and a pair of thin shoulders will not be esteemed beauty: we have had our ideas ruined by trash novels, praising 'fragile forms' and 'delicate beauty,' 'dainty waists,' 'snow-drop faces,' and a lot of other nonsense.

in a Home it must be order or ruin. Order is to the house as morality to the human being - a sheet-anchor.

human honesty has its varieties; so does human ignorance.

Talent and generosity are needed to recognize talent and generosity in our companions; all is discord to an ear that has no idea of harmonies, but it needs a musical ear to delight in music.

Good manners are not bred in moments, but in years.