Margaret Fuller Quotes

If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.

Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.

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.

It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth, but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul.

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.

Woman is born for love, and it is impossible to turn her from seeking it.

Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.

Wine is earth's answer to the sun.

Amid all your duties, keep some hours to yourself.

There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves.

Truth is the first of jewels.

It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.

Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.

Pain has no effect but to steal some of my time.

There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.

Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.

Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and the pruning knife.

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.

We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness.

Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.

Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.

I accept the universe!

Artists are always young.

It is a vulgar error that love, a love, to woman is her whole existence; she is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy

For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself

While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.

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.

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.

What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.

Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.

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.

Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty.

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.

It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.

It seems that it is madder never to abandon one's self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor.