Quote collection
127 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"It should be remarked that, as the principle of liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of women. As men become aware that few have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance."
"Man can never come up to his ideal standard. It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward. The wisest and greatest men are ever the most modest."
"What a difference it makes to come home to a child!"
"When the intellect and affections are in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep; inspiration will not be confounded with fancy."
"Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break."
"Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life."
"What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind."
"The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three."
"In order that she may be able to give her hand with dignity, she must be able to stand alone."
"Our friends should be our incentives to right, but not only our guiding, but our prophetic, stars. To love by right is much, to love by faith is more; both are the entire love, without which heart, mind, and soul cannot be alike satisfied. We love and ought to love one another, not merely for the absolute worth of each, but on account of a mutual fitness of temporary character."
"Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, despite impediments. But there should be encouragement, and a free genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort, fair play for each in its own kind."
"Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth."
"Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty."
"But the golden-rod is one of the fairy, magical flowers; it grows not up to seek human love amid the light of day, but to mark to the discerning what wealth lies hid in the secret caves of earth."
"Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness."
"The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work."
"Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance without becoming original."
"This is the method of genius, to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain."
"Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions."
"The public must learn how to cherish the nobler and rarer plants, and to plant the aloe, able to wait a hundred years for it's bloom, or it's garden will contain, presently, nothing but potatoes and pot-herbs."