Welcome to the web’s most comprehensive site of quotations by women. 43,939 quotations are searchable by topic, by author's name, or by keyword. Many of them appear in no other collection. And new ones are added continually.
Search by Topic:
Find quotations by TOPIC (coffee, love, dogs)
or search alphabetically below.
Search by Last Name:
Search by Keyword:
Sylvia Ashton-Warner
-
“No other job in the world could possibly dispossess one so completely as this job of teaching. You could stand all day in a laundry, for instance, still in possession of your mind. But this teaching utterly obliterates you. It cuts right into your being: essentially, it takes over your spirit.”
-
“To feel as well as hear what someone says requires whole attention.”
-
“When love turns away, now, I don't follow it. I sit and suffer, unprotesting, until I feel the tread of another step.”
-
“Children have two visions, the inner and the outer. Of the two the inner vision is brighter.”
-
“I see the mind of a five-year-old as a volcano with two vents; destructiveness and creativeness.”
-
“... of the two kinds of order, the conscious and the unconscious order, only one is real. It's the order in the deep hidden places.”
-
“... we already have so much pressure towards sameness through radio, film and comic outside the school, that we can't afford to do a thing inside that is not toward individual development ...”
-
“There is only one answer to destructiveness and that is creativity.”
-
“In no time the conversation was leaping like canoes with the tide.”
-
“Education, fundamentally, is the increase of the percentage of the conscious in relation to the unconscious. It must be a developing idea.”
-
“When I teach people I marry them.”
-
“It's just as possible to live to the full in a narrow corner as it is in bigness.”
-
“... not just part of us becomes a teacher. It engages the whole self — the woman or man, wife or husband, mother or father, the lover, scholar or artist in you as well as the teacher earning money ...”
-
“How I went for them! I flung my tongue round like a cat-o'-nine-tails so that my pleasant peaceful infant room became little less than a German concentration camp as I took out on the children what life should have got.”
-
“I am my own University, I my own Professor.”
-
“... being always overavid, I demand from those I love a love equal to mine, which, being balanced people, they cannot supply.”
-
“A comforting acquaintance, hope, a contagious thing like spring, inebriating like lager.”
-
“Truth has beauty, power and necessity.”
-
“I'm inclined to think that eating is a private thing and should be done alone, like other bodily functions ...”
-
“Off fall the wife, the mother, the lover, the teacher, and the violent artist takes over. I am I alone. I belong to no one but myself. I mate with no one but the spirit. I own no land, have no kin, no friend or enemy. I have no road but this one.”
-
“Inspiration is the richest nation I know, the most powerful on earth. Sexual energy Freud calls it; the capital of desire I call it; it pays for both mental and physical expenditure.”
-
“... I suspect that with the dreaming ingredients of a mind worked off first, the laboring intellect would be clearer for practical application. Think of a room where we all came running in first thing in the morning to plunge into creativity! Ah ... tense orgasm! ... so that, detumesced, we could settle for numbers later. But you won't find that in my teaching scheme. The curriculum would be a wounded marine — it would die on the way to hospital. A teacher could be dismissed for such outlawry, sacked for sheer insanity. But oh, the children would love it, and the teacher be elevated. The children would love the teacher and the teacher would love the children.”
-
“How much of my true self I camouflage and choke in order to commend myself to him, denying the fullness of me. How often have I paraded sweetness and interest when I felt otherwise; pretended to take careful leave of him on many an occasion when I would rather have walked right out. How I've toned myself down, diluted myself to maintain his approval.”
-
“Love has the quality of informing almost everything — even one's work.”
-
“I never forgive attacks on my work.”
-
“What a desire! ... to live in peace with that word: Myself.”
-
“Self-forgetfulness in creativity can lead to self-transcendence ...”
-
“One is not born a genius. One becomes a genius.”
Sylvia Ashton-Warner, New Zealand writer, educator
(1908 - 1984)
Full name: Sylvia Constance Ashton-Warner.