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Quotes from Forty Thousand Quotations — Amos Bronson Alcott

1799–1888 United States

← All quotes by Amos Bronson Alcott

70 quotes

The wisest and best are repulsive, if they are characterized by repulsive manners. Politeness is an easy virtue, costs little, and has great purchasing power.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Our favorites are few: since only what rises from the heart reaches it, being caught and carried on the tongues of men wheresoever love and letters journey.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

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

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Experience converts us to ourselves when books fail us.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Our dreams drench us in sense, and sense steeps us again in dreams.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

When one becomes indifferent to women, to children, and young people, he may know that he is superannuated, and has withdrawn from whatsoever is sweetest and purest in human existence.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Modesty is bred of self-reverence. Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament. Nor is there a paradise planted until the children appear in the foreground, to animate and complete the picture.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

The surest sign of age is loneliness. While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot be old, whatever his years may be.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

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.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams, and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Would Shakespeare and Raleigh have done their best, would that galaxy have shone so bright in the heavens had there been no Elizabeth on the throne?

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

A good style fits like a good costume.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Every sin provokes its punishment.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

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.

Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Amos Bronson Alcott (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.