Frances Hodgson Burnett Quotes About Habits

“But still night after night the game was played.”

The brief sentence makes repetition itself visible: improvement continues after early success because practice is maintained night after night.

Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. 'The game' is the boys’ repeated training exercise in memory, recognition and recall.

“The more you draw, the better. Draw everything you can.”

Repeated drawing is treated as the route to improvement, making practice and quantity of attempts part of developing a useful skill.

Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. Loristan encourages Marco to strengthen a sketching ability useful to the story’s secret mission.

“I learned well because I never forgot it. And I learned. Did I not?”

Marco looks back on deliberate training and judges himself by whether he actually learned and retained what repeated instruction required.

Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. Marco says this while explaining that his father had long been preparing him for responsibility within the fictional plot.

“To make each one many times was the best way to imbed it in his memory.”

The narration connects repeated practice with stronger recall, showing Marco deliberately using repetition to make a learned association more durable.

Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The exercise involves repeatedly sketching faces connected with places for the novel’s secret mission.

“It is well to observe everything and to train one's self to remember faces and circumstances.”

Observation and memory are presented as trainable abilities strengthened by deliberate attention rather than fixed talents that either appear or do not.

Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. Loristan is training Marco for a fictional diplomatic and political mission, so the advice belongs to that narrative setting.

“Another part was The Rat's training of his memory, and bringing home his proofs of advance at night when he returned from his walk.”

The Rat tracks improvement through repeated memory exercises and concrete evidence of progress, making development something practiced and demonstrated over time.

Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The exercise is part of the boys’ fictional preparation; 'proofs of advance' refers to remembered and described observations.

“They concentrated all their powers upon it. They wrote and re-wrote—they repeated to each other what they committed to memory as if it were a lesson.”

The boys improve through concentrated rehearsal, rewriting and mutual repetition, giving the learning process visible effort rather than effortless talent.

Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The material being memorized belongs to a fictional covert political mission, so the record focuses on the described study process rather than the mission itself.

“The game he had amused himself with so long—the game of trying to remember pictures and people and places clearly and in detail—had been a wonderful training.”

A game repeatedly practiced for pleasure becomes useful preparation, showing skill growing out of accumulated attention rather than appearing only when the stakes become serious.

Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The narration refers to Marco’s long-running memory game, which later becomes useful inside the novel’s fictional secret mission.

“Where you tend a rose, my lad, A thistle cannot grow.”

The gardening proverb connects what is repeatedly tended with what has less room to take over, giving cultivation both a literal and character-forming role in the novel.

Source note: The Secret Garden, near the novel’s close; Project Gutenberg #113. The line is a gardening metaphor inside children’s fiction, not a scientific rule about thoughts or mental health.