Lady Mary Wortley Montagu Quotes: Sources, Meanings & Themes
Browse quotations by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu with named works, context notes, meanings and recurring themes.
Source identified1
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“No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting.”
Meaning & context
Montagu presents reading as unusually durable entertainment: inexpensive, repeatable, private, and capable of widening a person’s intellectual world.
Source details
Letter discussing education and reading, preserved in collections of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s correspondence.
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“I know but too well how time flies along, That we live but few years, and yet fewer are young.”
Meaning & context
The speaker recognizes that both life and youth are brief, then uses that awareness to explain why a relationship should be worth the time and consequences it demands.
Source details
The Lover: A Ballad, represented by the University of Toronto Representative Poetry Online text from Robert Dodsley’s 1748 A Collection of Poems by Several Hands. The line belongs to a lyric speaker weighing desire against the risk of later regret; it is not treated as a verbatim autobiographical confession by Montagu.
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“How am I chang'd! alas! how am I grown A frightful spectre, to myself unknown!”
Meaning & context
Flavia experiences the change in her appearance as a shock to identity, exposing how strongly her former social value and self-image had been tied to youth and beauty.
Source details
“Saturday. The Small-Pox” in Six Town Eclogues (1747), represented by the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive. Flavia speaks after smallpox has altered her appearance. Montagu survived smallpox herself, but this record preserves the poem’s dramatic Flavia voice and eighteenth-century beauty/satire context rather than collapsing it into autobiography or medical advice.
