Top 120 Amos Bronson Alcott Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Prudence is the footprint of Wisdom.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

2. “Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Featured in: Friendship Quotes

3. “Health, longevity, beauty, are other names for personal purity; and temperance is the regimen for all.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

4. “Our bravest and best lessons are not learned through success, but through misadventure.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

5. “Love is the key to felicity, nor is there a heaven to any who love not. We enter Paradise through its gates only.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

6. “Yet the deepest truths are best read between the lines, and, for the most part, refuse to be written.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

7. “That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Featured in: Reading Quotes

8. “Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

9. “Debate is masculine, conversation is feminine.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

10. “Ignorance is innocence – stupidity comes with experience.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

11. “The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

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

— Amos Bronson Alcott

13. “Conversation is an abandonment to ideas, a surrender to persons.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

14. “Creeds, like other goods, pass by inheritance to descendants.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

15. “One’s outlook is a part of his virtue.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

16. “Many can argue – not many converse.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

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

— Amos Bronson Alcott

18. “Books are the most mannerly of companions, accessible at all times, in all moods, frankly declaring the author’s mind, without offense.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Featured in: Reading Quotes

19. “A candid spirit is mightier than the most persistent dogmatism.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

20. “Debate is angular, conversation circular and radiant of the underlying unity.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

21. “Time is one’s best friend, teaching best of all the wisdom of silence.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

22. “Good discourse sinks differences and seeks agreements.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

23. “Plans made in the nursery Can change the course of history.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

24. “Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

25. “To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

26. “Egotists cannot converse, they talk to themselves only.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

27. “While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot feel old, no matter what his years may be.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

28. “Experience converts us to ourselves when books fail us.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

29. “Man is a living lie – a bitter jest Upon himself – a conscious grain of sand Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

30. “Heaven trims our lamps while we sleep.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

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

— Amos Bronson Alcott

32. “Sleep on your writing; take a walk over it; scrutinize it of a morning; review it of an afternoon; digest it after a meal; let it sleep in your drawer a twelvemonth; never venture a whisper about it to your friend, if he be an author especially.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

33. “Without a mythology, faith is impersonal and heartless.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

34. “Fullness is always quiet; agitation will answer for empty vessels only.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

35. “A happy childhood is the pledge of a ripe manhood.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

36. “Many are those who can argue; few are those who can converse.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

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

— Amos Bronson Alcott

Featured in: Momentum Quotes

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

— Amos Bronson Alcott

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

— Amos Bronson Alcott

40. “Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

41. “Education may work wonders as well in warping the genius of individuals as in seconding it.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

42. “Of gifts, there seems none more becoming to offer a friend than a beautiful book.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

43. “Where there is a mother in the home, matters go well.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

44. “Cleanse the fountain if you would purify the streams.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

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

— Amos Bronson Alcott

46. “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?”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

47. “Like birds of passage, the instincts drift the soul adventurously beyond the horizon of sensible things, as if intent on convoying it to the mother country from whence it had flown.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

48. “Whatsoever stirs the stagnant currents, setting these flowing in wholesome directions, promotes brisk spirits and productive thinking. The less of routine, the more of life.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

49. “Where women are, the better things are implied if not spoken.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott

50. “As education becomes inclusive, introspective, cosmic, promoting whole populations to power and privilege, it enthrones a vast, invisible, personal rule over the common mind.”

— Amos Bronson Alcott