Amos Bronson Alcott quotes
Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888): American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. The library holds 47 quotes by Amos Bronson Alcott. The 47 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Often about: life, creativity, health, knowledge, time, friendship
The best-known Amos Bronson Alcott quotes
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Heaven trims our lamps while we sleep.
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Manners carry the world for the moment, character for all time.
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Our bravest lessons are not learned through success, but misadventure.
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One must have lived greatly whose record would bear the full light of day from its beginning to its close.
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Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
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Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
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Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators.
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Our dreams drench us in sense, and sense steeps us again in dreams.
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Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen, the more select the more enjoyable.
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A sip is the most that mortals are permitted from any goblet of delight.
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Life is too much for most. So much of age, so little of youth; living, for the most part, in the moment, and dating existence by the memory of its burdens.
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Enthusiasm imparts itself magnetically, and fuses all into one happy and harmonious unity of feeling and sentiment.
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In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
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It is easier to carry the world in one’s thoughts than on one’s shoulders.
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Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament.
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Character is a fact, and that is much in a world of pretence and concession.
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A government for protecting business and bread only is but a carcase, and soon falls by its own corruption to decay.
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Health, longevity, beauty are other names for personal purity, and temperance is the regimen for all.
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Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its centre and ornament. Nor is there a paradise planted till the children appear in the foreground to animate and complete the picture.
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Debate is masculine, conversation is feminine; the former angular, the latter circular and radiant of the underlying unity.
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With temperance, health, cheerfulness, friends, a chosen task, one pays the cheapest fees for living, and may well dispense with other physicians.
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Conversation is an abandonment to ideas, a surrender to persons.
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To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of ignorance.
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We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.
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Education may work wonders as well in warping the genius of individuals as in seconding it.
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Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in man, and finds the readiest response.
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Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs.
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If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken, we moderns are building houses for them.
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There are truths that shield themselves behind veils, and are best spoken by implication. Even the sun veils himself in his own rays to blind the gaze of the too curious starer.
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Divination seems heightened to its highest power in woman.
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Success is sweet; the sweeter if long delayed, and attained through manifold struggles and defeats.
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Good discourse sinks differences and seeks agreements.
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Experience converts us to ourselves when books fail us.
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Egotists cannot converse; they talk to themselves only.
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Where there is a mother in the home, matters speed well.
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Civilisation degrades the many to exalt the few.
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Who knows the mind has the key to all things else.
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One’s piety is best displayed in his pursuits.
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Inspiration must find answering inspiration.
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A work of real merit finds favour at last.
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The richest minds need not large libraries.
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Every man is his own greatest dupe. A. B.
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The surest sign of age is loneliness.
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Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon, of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll.
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The less routine the more of life.
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Our ideals are our better selves.
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Many can argue, not many converse.