Margaret Fuller
(1810-50)
Writer, Lecturer
Birthplace: Cambridge
Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through
which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
For human beings are not so constituted, that they can live without expansion;
and if they do not get it one way, must another, or perish.
For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.
Genius will live and thrive without raining, but it does not the less reward the
watering-pot and the pruning-knife.
Harmony exists in difference no less than in likeness, if only the same key-note
govern both parts.
It is a vulgar error that love, a love, to woman is her whole existence; she is
also born for Truth and Love in their universal energy.
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.
Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive
in function, spiritual in tendency.
The soul of the great musician can only be expressed in music.
The well-instructed moon flies not from her orbit to seize on the glories of her partner.
There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
Truth is the nursing mother of genius.
Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.
We cannot have expression till there is something to be expressed.
What a difference it makes to come home to a child.
Our country is the world--our countrymen are all mankind.
William Lloyd Garrison
(1805-79)
Abolitionist, Writer, Editor
Birthplace: Newburyport
Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to
moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother
to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but
urge me not to use moderation in a case like the present.
I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not
retreat a single inch--and I will be heard!
Nathaniel Hawthorne
(1804-64)
Novelist
Birthplace: Salem
A woman's chastity consists, like an onion, of a series of coats.
It contributes greatly towards a man's moral and intellectual health, to be
brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who
care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out
of himself to appreciate.
We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest.
In the depths of every heart, there is a tomb and a dungeon, though the lights,
the music, and revelry above may cause us to forget their existence, and the buried ones,
or prisoners whom they hide. But sometimes, and oftenest at midnight, those dark
receptacles are flung wide open. In an hour like this, when the mind has a
passive sensibility, but no active strength; when the imagination is a mirror,
imparting vividness to all ideas, without the power of selecting or controlling
them; then pray that your griefs may slumber, and the brotherhood of remorse not
break their chain.
We sometimes congratulate ourselves at the moment of waking from a troubled
dream; it may be so the moment after death.
Is it a fact--or have I dreamt it--that, by means of electricity, the world
of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a
breathless point of time?
The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be
going to prove one's self a fool; the truest heroism is to resist the doubt;
and the profoundest wisdom, to know when it ought to be resisted, and when it be obeyed.
Beyond all question, I might have had a wiser friend than he. The atmosphere
in which alone he breathed was dense; his awful dread of death showed how much
muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, before he could be capable of
spiritual existence; he meddled only with the surface of life, and never cared
to penetrate further than to ploughshare depth; his very sense and sagacity
were but a one-eyed clear-sightedness. . . . Dr. Johnson's morality was as
English an article as a beefsteak.
It is a good lesson--though it may often be a hard one--for a man who has
dreamed of literary fame, and of making for himself a rank among the world's
dignitaries by such means, to step aside out of the narrow circle in which
his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly devoid of all
significance, beyond that circle, is all that he achieves, and all he aims at.
My fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should entertain an
idea of committing suicide, and, altogether beyond his hopes, meet with
the good hap to be murdered.
Yesterday I went out at about twelve, and visited the British Museum; an
exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once; and I
wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing
(Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the
Parthenon were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian
statues were hewn and squared into building stones, and that the
mummies had all turned to dust, two thousand years ago; and, in fine,
that all the material relics of so many successive ages had disappeared
with the generations that produced them. The present is burthened too much with the past.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness
they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their
earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a
cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.
I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no limits and
no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything
falls away except one's native State;--neither can you seize hold of that,
unless you tear it out of the Union, bleeding and quivering.
Unquestionably we do stand by our national flag as stoutly as any people in
the world; and I myself have felt the heart-throb at sight of it, as sensibly as other men.
Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen
of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may
apologize for a lack of decent clothing.
See! those fiendish lineaments graven on the darkness, the writhed lip of
scorn, the mockery of that living eye, the pointed finger, touching the sore
place in your heart! Do you remember any act of enormous folly, at which you
would blush, even in the remotest cavern of the earth? Then recognize your Shame.
Nobody has any conscience about adding to the improbabilities of a marvelous tale.
Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who
cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually
expressed. Their highest merit is suggestiveness.
No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a
romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery,
no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity,
in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.
The world, that gray-bearded and wrinkled profligate, decrepit, without being venerable.
Man's own youth is the world's youth; at least he feels as if it were, and
imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened,
and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.
Oliver Wendell Holmes
(1809-94)
Author, Physician
Birthplace: Cambridge
To be seventy years young is sometimes far more cheerful and hopeful than
to be forty years old.
Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.
The morning cup of coffee has an exhilaration about it which the cheering
influence of the afternoon or evening cup of tea cannot be expected to reproduce.
Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.
Why can't somebody give us a list of things that everybody thinks and
nobody says, and another list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks.
And when you stick on conversation's burrs,
Don't strew your pathway with those dreadful urs.
Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left.
The freeman, casting with unpurchased hand
The vote that shakes the turrets of the land.
A great calamity . . . is as old as the trilobites an hour after it has happened.
What I call a good patient is one who, having found a good physician, sticks
to him till he dies.
What a comfort a dull but kindly person is, to be sure, at times! A ground-glass
shade over a gas-lamp does not bring more solace to our dazzled eyes than such a
one to our minds.
All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called "facts." They are
the brute beasts of the intellectual domain. Who does not know fellows that
always have an ill-conditioned fact or two that they lead after them into decent
company like so many bull-dogs, ready to let them slip at every ingenious
suggestion, or convenient generalization, or pleasant fancy? I allow no "facts" at
this table.
Unpretending mediocrity is good, and genius is glorious; but a weak flavor of
genius in an essentially common person is detestable. It spoils the grand
neutrality of a commonplace character, as the rinsings of an unwashed wine-glass
spoil a draught of fair water.
People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more
rarely than those who try to be "consistent."
Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked.
A pun does not commonly justify a blow in return. But if a blow were
given for such cause, and death ensued, the jury would be judges both
of the facts and of the pun, and might, if the latter were of an aggravated
character, return a verdict of justifiable homicide.
The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo
lasts a great deal longer.
Life and language are alike sacred. Homicide and verbicide--that is,
violent treatment of a word with fatal results to its legitimate meaning,
which is its life--are alike forbidden.
Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads.
A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.
People who make puns are like wanton boys that put coppers on the railroad
tracks. They amuse themselves and other children, but their little trick
may upset a freight train of conversation for the sake of a battered witticism.
How many people live on the reputation of the reputation they might have made!
Don't you stay at home on evenings?
Don't you love a cushioned seat
In a corner, by the fireside, with your slippers on your feet?
The world's great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its
great scholars great men.
And Silence, like a poultice, comes
To heal the blows of sound.
Speak clearly, if you speak at all;
Carve every word before you let it fall.
Little-minded people's thoughts move in such small circles that five
minutes' conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve.
Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may
kick it about all day like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.
It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.