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:
Margaret Fuller
-
“Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.”
-
“Man is not made for society, but society is made for man. No institution can be good which does not tend to improve the individual.”
-
“As to marriage, I think the intercourse of heart and mind may be fully enjoyed without entering into this partnership of daily life.”
-
“Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.”
-
“Pain has no effect but to steal some of my time.”
-
“Life is richly worth living, with its continual revelations of mighty woe, yet infinite hope; and I take it to my breast.”
-
“I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.”
-
“Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.”
-
“Certainly I do not wish that instead of these masters I had read baby books, written down to children, and with such ignorant dullness that they blunt the sense and corrupt the tastes of the still plastic human being. But I do wish that I had read no books at all till later — that I had lived with toys, and played in the open air. Children should not cull the fruits of reflection and observation early, but expand in the sun, and let thoughts come to them. They should not through books antedate their actual experiences ... ”
-
“The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. The critic is not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. And of making others appreciate it ...”
-
“The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.”
-
“... there is such a rebound from parental influence that it generally seems that the child makes use of the directions given by the parent only to avoid the prescribed path.”
-
“The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.”
-
“ ... better to be wounded, a captive, and a slave, than always to walk in armor. ”
-
“The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.”
-
“... men, for the sake of getting a living, forget to live.”
-
“ No temple can still the personal griefs and strifes in the breasts of its visitors. ”
-
“Let me stand in my age with all its waters flowing round me. If they sometimes subdue, they must finally upbear me, for I seek the universal, — and that must be the best.”
-
“The Arabian horse will not plough well, nor can the plough-horse be rode to play the jereed.”
-
“Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though, in truth, his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking!”
-
“Every fact is impure, but every fact contains in it the juices of life. Every fact is a clod, from which may grow an amaranth or a palm. ”
-
“Our desires, once realized, haunt us again less readily.”
-
“To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph, — mere stops.”
-
“Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.”
-
“Wine is earth's answer to the sun.”
-
“We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man. If you ask me what offices they may fill; I will reply — any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea-captains if you will.”
-
“Not one man, in the million, shall I say? no, not in the hundred million, can rise above the belief that woman was made for man ... ”
-
“I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither are yet softened by the shadows of evening. Every spot is seen, every chasm revealed.”
-
“ The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.”
-
“Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind as harrowing and planting those of the earth.”
-
“While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.”
-
“A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.”
-
“Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.”
-
“Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But, in fact, they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”
-
“ If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up.”
-
“Union is only possible to those who are units. To be fit for relations in time, souls, whether of man or woman, must be able to do without them in the spirit.”
-
“For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it one way, they must another, or perish.”
-
“Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break.”
-
“Harmony exists in difference, no less than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.”
-
“Nature provides exceptions to every rule.”
-
“... the Power who gave a power, by its mere existence, signifies that it must be brought out towards perfection.”
-
“The highest ideal man can form of his own powers, is that which he is destined to attain. Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain. This is the law and the prophets. Knock and it shall be opened, seek and ye shall find. It is demonstrated; it is a maxim.”
-
“These were American ladies, i.e., they were of that class who have wealth and leisure to make full use of the day, and confer benefits on others.”
-
“I am tired of keeping myself up in the water without corks, and without strength to swim. I should like to go to sleep, and be born again.”
-
“If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.”
-
“Always Art is Art, only by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.”
-
“A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. — Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.”
-
“Who can ever be alone for a moment in Italy? Every stone has a voice, every grain of dust seems instinct with spirit from the Past, every step recalls some line, some legend of long-neglected lore.”
-
“How anyone can remain a Catholic — I mean who has ever been aroused to think, and is not biased by the partialities of childish years — after seeing Catholicism here in Italy I cannot conceive.”
-
“Rome so beautiful, so great; her presence stupifies, and one has to withdraw to prize the treasures she has given. City of the Soul! yes, it is that; the very dust magnetizes you, and thousand spells have been chaining you in every careless, every murmuring moment.”
-
“... you cannot know thoroughly know anything till you have both summered and wintered it ... ”
-
“I myself am more divine than any I see.”
-
“Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering-pot and pruning knife.”
-
“I feel within myself an immense power, but I cannot bring it out. I stand a barren vine-stalk; no grape will swell, though the richest wine is slumbering in its roots.”
-
“For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.”
-
“It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. It is pleasant to be sure of it, because it is undoubtedly the same love that we shall feel when we are angels ... ”
-
“O what can be so forlorn in its forlorn parts as this traveling? the ceaseless packing and unpacking, the heartless, uncongenial intercourses, the cheerless hotel, the many hours when you are too tired and your feelings too much dissipated to settle to any pursuit, yet you either have nothing to look at or are weary of looking.”
-
“I accept the universe!”
-
“What a difference it makes to come home to a child!”
-
“Preparations are good in life, prologues ruinous.”
-
“Perhaps it is a weakness to confide to you embryo designs, which never may glow into life, or mock me by their failure.”
-
“The effect of continued prosperity is the same on nations as on individuals, — it leaves the nobler faculties undeveloped. The need of bringing out the physical resources of a vast extent of country the commercial and political fever incident to our institutions, tend to fix the eyes of men on what is local and temporary, on the external advantages of their condition. The superficial diffusion of knowledge, unless attended by a correspondent deepening of its sources, is likely to vulgarize rather than to raise the thought of a nation, depriving them of another sort of education through sentiments of reverence, and leading the multitude to believe themselves capable of judging what they but dimly discern. They see a wide surface, and forget the difference between seeing and knowing. ... In a word, the tendency of circumstances has been to make our people superficial, irreverent, and more anxious to get a living than to live mentally and morally.”
-
“New minds have come to reveal themselves to me, though I do not wish it, for I feel myself inadequate to the ties already formed. I have not strength or time to do anything as I would, or meet the thoughts of those I love already. But these new have come with gifts too fair to be refused and which have cheered my passive mind.”
-
“Artists are always young.”
-
“Some degree of expression is necessary for growth, but it should be little in proportion to the full life.”
-
“The persons whom you have idolized can never, in the end, be ungrateful, and, probably, at the time of retreat they still do justice to your heart. But, so long as you must draw persons too near you, a temporary recoil is sure to follow. It is the character striving to defend itself from a heating and suffocating action upon it.”
-
“ Truth is the first of jewels.”
-
“O, were life but longer, and my strength greater! Ever I am bewildered by the riches of existence, had I but more time to open the oysters, and get out the pearls. Yet some are mine, if only for a necklace or rosary.”
-
“Those have not lived who have not seen Rome. ”
-
“Spirits that have once been sincerely united and tended together a sacred flame, never become entirely stranger to one another's life.”
-
“The life of the soul is incalculable.”
-
“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles at it.”
-
“This was one of the rye-bread days, all dull and damp without.”
Margaret Fuller, U.S. writer, journalist, poet, critic
(1810 - 1850)
Full name: Sarah Margaret Fuller, Marchesa d’Ossoli