Browse 10 quotations connecting Frances Hodgson Burnett with Motivation For Life, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include The Lost Prince, The Secret Garden. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include The Lost Prince, The Secret Garden.
“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.
“After a third day's concentration they knew by heart everything given to them to learn.”
The narration connects sustained concentration across several days with mastery of the assigned material rather than portraying learning as instantaneous.
Source note: The Lost Prince; Project Gutenberg #384. The material being memorized is fictional mission information, while the quoted sentence simply describes the learning process.
“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.
“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.
“I had to try myself at the same time, of course.”
Colin explicitly adds his own effort to the encouragement he received, keeping agency and practice inside the novel’s language of 'Magic.'
Source note: The Secret Garden; Project Gutenberg #113. The sentence immediately follows Colin’s memory of being encouraged while attempting to stand; it remains fictional context, not rehabilitation guidance.
“Being alive is the Magic—being strong is the Magic.”
Colin’s chant celebrates life and increasing strength as something wondrous after a long period in which he expected decline and death.
Source note: The Secret Garden; Project Gutenberg #113. This is a fictional child’s 'Magic' rhetoric and not evidence that illness can be cured by belief or positive thinking.
“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, then they begin to hope it can be done.”
New possibilities often move through stages from disbelief to curiosity and finally hope, especially when evidence begins to challenge settled expectations.
Source note: The Secret Garden, Chapter XXVII; the narrator describes how unfamiliar possibilities gradually become believable.