Anna Brownell Jameson Quotes

In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.

Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of mind, for the moment realizes itself.

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side.

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.

Modesty and chastity are twins

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are.

Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love.

To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another.

The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us.

Fame is that which is known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords-philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust.

Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.

Occupation was one of the pleasures of paradise, and we cannot be happy without it.

Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

Never yet were the feelings and instincts of our nature violated with impunity; never yet was the voice of conscience silenced without retribution.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.

A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.

A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.

In our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.

Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals.

When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.

A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious.

Even virtue itself, all perfect as it is, requires to be inspirited by passion; for duties are but coldly performed which are but philosophically fulfilled.

Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.

Now, it is a good sanitary principle, that what is curative is preventive.

As the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so, through social conventionalism, the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.

Out of the attempt to harmonize our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry, - or, it may be, religion.

Opinion has ever been stronger than law.

Of how many women might the history be comprised in those few words - 'she lived, suffered, and was buried'!

We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.

If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more.

Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.

Satan--the impersonation of that mixture of the bestial, the malignant, the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute the fiend--the enemy of all that is human and divine.

Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is like the tinkling cymbal, and when it does not tinkle it jingles, and when it does not jingle, it jars.

As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.

Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world. Yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted in the world.

the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.

You must never believe what the newspapers say. I stand aghast at the impudence of the lies they contain, things not only false in fact, but absolutely impossible.

A cunning mind emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning.

The streams which would otherwise diverge to fertilize a thousand meadows, must be directed into one deep narrow channel before they can turn a mill.