Anna Brownell Jameson
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.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: Ninety Nine
Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love.Collection: Nature
All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.Collection: Exercise
Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to carve out their own purposes.Collection: Wise
If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man, he makes her miserable, but seldom governs her mind or vulgarizes her nature; and if there be love on his side, the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Mean
What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are.Collection: Aspiration
Of how many women might the history be comprised in those few words - 'she lived, suffered, and was buried'!Collection: Women
Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.Collection: Vanity
Opinion has ever been stronger than law.Collection: Law
Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.Collection: Poverty
I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism.Collection: Home
The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us.Collection: Education
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.Collection: Inspirational
Nature is boundless in her powers, exhausting in her variety: the powers of Art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite, has circumscribed the bounds of finite Art. The one is the divinity; the other the priestess.Collection: Art
A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.Collection: Doe
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.Collection: Love Is
the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.Collection: Genius
The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.Collection: Together
Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords-philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Art
Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.Collection: Children
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.Collection: Art
Now, it is a good sanitary principle, that what is curative is preventive.Collection: Health
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.Collection: Poetry
whatever is morally wrong, is equally wrong in man and in woman and no virtue is to be cultivated in one sex, that is not equally required by the other.Collection: Sex
How often we have had cause to regret that the histrionic art, of all the fine arts the most intense in its immediate effect, should be, of all others, the most transient in its result! - and the only memorials it can leave behind, at best, so imperfect and so unsatisfactory!Collection: Art
I do not like new things of any kind, not even a new gown, far less a new acquaintance, therefore make as few as possible; one can but have one's heart and hands full, and mine are. I have love and work enough to last me the rest of my life.Collection: Heart
I have great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness, especially in my own sex, yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength.Collection: Sex
Modesty and chastity are twinsCollection: Modesty
Work in some form or other is the appointed lot of all.Collection: Work
Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals.Collection: Greed
In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.Collection: Art
There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities ties which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts.Collection: Ties
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.Collection: Enemy
Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.Collection: Offering
Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.Collection: Heart
... the primitve Christians, by laying so much stress upon a future life in contradiction to this life, and placing the lower creatures out of the pale of sympathy, and thus had the foundation for this utter disregard of animals in the light of our fellow creatures.Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Forgiveness
The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced in sleep. I suppose it never happened to any one to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping state.Collection: Death
As the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so, through social conventionalism, the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.Collection: Fashion
Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Passion
A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.Collection: Art
A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious.Collection: Taste
Fame is that which is known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds.Collection: Echoes
Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.Collection: Fear
All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase "profound cunning," has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased.Collection: Profound
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.Collection: Goodbye