Top 158 Quotes & Sayings by Amos Bronson Alcott - Page 3

A good book is fruitful of other books; it perpetuates its fame from age to age, and makes eras in the lives of its readers.

Cities with all their advantages have something hostile to liberal learning, the seductions are so subtle and accost the senses so openly on all sides.

The more one endeavors to sound the depths of his ignorance the deeper the chasm appears.

Right is the royal ruler alone; and he who rules with least restraint comes nearest to empire.

The traveled mind is the catholic mind educated from exclusiveness and egotism.

The mind is fast emancipating itself from the dominion of man and of matter. It has let loose fearful forces on the world.

Heaven trims our lamps while we sleep.

Civilization degrades many in order to exalt the few.

Hold fast, therefore, O circular philosopher, to thy centre, and drive the globe along its orbit by the momentum of thy thought.

The best teachers don't allow their own personal views to influence their teaching.

Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.

The eyes have a property in things and territories not named in any title-deeds, and are the owners of our choicest possessions.

My favorite books have a personality and complexion as distinctly drawn as if the author's portrait were framed into the paragraphs and smiled upon me as I read his illustrated pages.

A good style fits like a good costume.

The books that charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards; we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any deserving our equal affections.

Every sin provokes its punishment.

The richest minds need not large libraries.

A happy childhood is the pledge of a ripe manhood.

A candid spirit is mightier than the most persistent dogmatism.

An age deficient in idealism has ever been one of immorality and superficial attainment, since without the sense of ideas, nobility of character becomes of rare attainment, if possible.

Action and blood now get the game. Disdain treads on the peaceful name.

One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books, though preparation is necessary to profitable reading; and the less reading is better than more;--book-struck men are of all readers least wise, however knowing or learned.

A check on itself, evil subserves the economies of good, as it were a condiment to give relish to good.

Equanimity is the gem in virtue's chaplet, and St. Sweetness the loveliest in her calendar.

Ourselves are cosmic and capacious beyond conjecture, and to experience some notion of the planetary perspective is the richest income from travelling. It takes all to inform and educate all. Sallies forth from our cramped firesides into other homes, other hearts, are wonderfully wholesome and enlarging. Travel opens prospects on all sides, widens our horizon, liberates the mind from geographical and conventional limitations, from local prejudices and national, showing the globe in its differing climates, zones, and latitudes of intelligence.

A man defines his standing at the court of chastity by his views of women.

Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression

What higher praise can we bestow on any one than to say of him that he harbors another's prejudices with a hospitality so cordial as to give him, for the time, the sympathy next best to, if indeed it be not edification in, charity itself. For what disturbs more and distracts mankind than the uncivil manners that cleave man from man?

Science has grown frightfully audacious in these days -- swift-footed, ponderous, careering over her iron ways with unslacking pace. This rampant dragon, on which I am mounted, see how he bends his once stiff neck to his rider, champing his checked bit and pawing the dust, impatient to leap around the globe. Genius is prescient, foresees its own might. Man is striving through these iron-ribbed, steam-sped hippogriffs, to recover his lost ubiquity and omnipotence, and threatens soon to grasp in his ample palm, and fix with flaming eye-ball, the elemental forces!

Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly, nor need we but love them devotedly to become members of an immortal fraternity, superior to accident or change.

Good-humor, gay spirits, are the liberators, the sure cure for spleen and melancholy. Deeper than tears, these irradiate the tophets with their glad heavens. Go laugh, vent the pits, transmuting imps into angels by the alchemy of smiles. The satans flee at the sight of these redeemers.

Nor is a day lived if the dawn is left out of it, with the prospects it opens. Who speaks charmingly of nature or of mankind, like him who comes bibulous of sunrise and the fountains of waters?

One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books.

The history of religions, of which Christianity is a transcendent element, awaits the deepest study. It requires Bibles to free from Bibles. Comparative theology is the best of studies for liberating one's mind from geographical and traditional limitations. Like travelling, it shows the globe in its varying climates and zones, its latitude and longitude of intelligence. When the races shall have learned each other's language, the significance of things to thoughts, one faith becomes universal, one brotherhood.

Ideas first and last: yet it is not till these are formulated and utilized that the devotees of the common sense discern their value and advantages. The idealist is the capitalist on whose resources multitudes are maintained life long. Ideas in the head set hands about their several tasks, thus carrying forward all human endeavors to their issues.

The finer literature, indeed, is characterized by a certain suffusion of the feminine flavor, the finer, the more ideal, thought plumed with sentiment; even science loves to spring from its feet, philosophy affect the clouds to inspire and edify.

Experience converts us to ourselves when books fail us.