Margaret Fuller > Quotes

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
― Margaret Fuller

“If you have knowledge , let others light their candles in it.”
― Margaret Fuller

“Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live. ”
― Margaret Fuller

“Nature provides exceptions to every rule.”
― Margaret Fuller

“There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”
― Margaret Fuller

“The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.”
― Margaret Fuller

“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.”
― Margaret Fuller

“Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.”
― Margaret Fuller

“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.”
― Margaret Fuller

“Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself”
― Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century

“What a difference it makes to come home to a child!”
― Margaret Fuller

“I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.”
― Margaret Fuller

“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.”
― Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century

“There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.”
― Margaret Fuller

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

“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
― Margaret Fuller”
― Margaret Fuller

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

“I now know all the people worth knowing in America and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”
― Margaret Fuller

“At Chicago I read again 'Philip Van Artevelde,' and certain passages in it will always be in my mind associated with the deep sound of the lake, as heard in the night. I used to read a short time at night, and then open the blind to look out. The moon would be full upon the lake, and the calm breath, pure light, and the deep voice, harmonized well with the thought of the Flemish hero. When will this country have such a man ? It is what she needs — no thin Idealist, no coarse Realist, but a man whose eye reads the heavens while his feet step firmly on the ground and his hands are strong and dextrous in the use of human instruments. A man, religious, virtuous and — sagacious; a man of universal sympathies, but self-possessed; a man who knows the region of emotion, though he is not its slave; a man to whom this world is no mere spectacle or fleeting shadow, but a great, solemn game, to be played with good heed, for its stakes are of eternal value, yet who, if his own play be true, heeds not what he loses by the falsehood of others. A man who lives from the past, yet knows that its honey can but moderately avail him; whose comprehensive eye scans the present, neither infatuated by its golden lures nor chilled by its many ventures; who possesses prescience, as the wise man must, but not so far as to be driven mad to-day by the gift which discerns to-morrow. When there is such a man for America, the thought which urges her on will be expressed.”
― Margaret Fuller

“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... Nature provides exceptions to every rule.”
― Margaret Fuller

“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.”
― Margaret Fuller