Margaret Fuller quotes:

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.

Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical.

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.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

What I mean by the Muse is that unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers, which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonition of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being. It may appear as prophesy or as poesy...should these faculties have free play, I believe they will open up new, deeper and purer sources of joyous inspiration than have as yet refreshed the earth.

Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.

A house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body.

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

Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day's performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.

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

Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.

The Arabian horse will not plough well, nor can the plough-horse be rode to play the jereed.

I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.

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.

It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.

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

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.

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.

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.

What a difference it makes to come home to a child!

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.

Preparations are good in life, prologues ruinous.

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

Put up at the moment of greatest suffering a prayer, not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the sovereign spirit will accept thy ransom.

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.

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

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

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.

Nature provides exceptions to every rule.

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 ...

We doubt not the destiny of our country that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points.

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

With the intellect, I always have-always shall overcome, but that is not half of the work of life. The life-oh my God-shall the life never be sweet?

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

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

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.

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

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 ...

Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth.

... the Power who gave a power, by its mere existence, signifies that it must be brought out towards perfection.

A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.

A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers.

After having admired the women of Rome, say to yourself, 'I too am beautiful!' ... In you I met a real person. I need not give you any other praise.

All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.

All great expression, which on a superficial survey seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes after a while, to the faithful observer, its own standard by which to appreciate it.

All greatness affects different minds, each in its own particular kind, and the variations of testimony mark the truth of feeling.

Amid all your duties, keep some hours to yourself.

Artists are always young.

As to marriage, I think the intercourse of heart and mind may be fully enjoyed without entering into this partnership of daily life.

Be what you would seem to be - or, if you'd like it put more simply - a house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Be what you would seem to be.

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.

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 ...

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.

Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.

Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.

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

How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone since they are content with so little.

I accept the universe!

I am 'too fiery'... yet I wish to be seen as I am and I would lose all rather than soften away anything.

I fear I have not one good word to say this fair morning, though the sun shines so encouragingly on the distant hills and gentle river and the trees are in their festive hues. I am not festive, though contented. When obliged to give myself to the prose of life, as I am on this occasion of being established in a new home I like to do the thing, wholly and quite, - to weave my web for the day solely from the grey yarn.

I find no intellect comparable to my own

I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage and prevented it her sex from being what it should be to itself or the other. I wish woman to live, first for God's sake. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then if she finds what she needs in man embodied, she will know how to love and be worthy of being loved.

I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue.

I should never stand alone in this desert world, but that manna would drop from heaven, if I would but rise with every rising sun to gather it.

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.

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.

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.

In order that she may be able to give her hand with dignity, she must be able to stand alone.

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

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

Let no one dare to call another mad who is not himself willing to rank in the same class for every perversion and fault of judgment. Let no one dare aid in punishing another as criminal who is not willing to suffer the penalty due to his own offenses.

Life is richly worth living, with its continual revelations of mighty woe, yet infinite hope; and I take it to my breast.

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.

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.

Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowers bloom even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into moss and lichens. This faculty is uncomparingly the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to the minds of men.

Nature seems to have poured forth her riches so without calculation, merely to mark the fullness of her joy.

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

No temple can still the personal griefs and strifes in the breasts of its visitors.

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 ...

Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.

Our desires, once realized, haunt us again less readily.

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.

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

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.

Some degree of expression is necessary for growth, but it should be little in proportion to the full life.

Spirits that have once been sincerely united and tended together a sacred flame, never become entirely stranger to one another's life.

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

The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.

The Greeks saw everything in forms which we are trying to ascertain as law, and classify as cause.

The life of the soul is incalculable.

The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose.

The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.

The only woman to whom it has been given to touch what is decisive in the present world and to have a presentiment of the world of the future.

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.

The soul of the great musician can only be expressed in music.

There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.

There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see I think that is enough to say about them...

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

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

There is some danger lest there be no real religion in the heart which craves too much daily sympathy.

Those have not lived who have not seen Rome.

Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains.

Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break.

Truth is the first of jewels.

Truth is the nursing mother of genius.

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.

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.

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