Anna Brownell Jameson Quotes

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.

Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.

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.

Of how many women might the history be comprised in those few words - 'she lived, suffered, and was buried'!

Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love.

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.

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.

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.

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are.

Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.

Opinion has ever been stronger than law.

Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us.

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.

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.

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.

A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.

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.

the distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.

You must never believe what the newspapers say. I stand aghast at the impudence of the lies they contain, things not only false in fact, but absolutely impossible.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords-philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.