Top 60 Anna Brownell Jameson Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

2. “Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

3. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

5. “Out of the attempt to harmonize our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry, – or, it may be, religion.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

6. “A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

8. “It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man – the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse – the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

9. “A cunning mind emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

10. “Modesty and chastity are twins.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

13. “Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

15. “A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

17. “As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

19. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

20. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

21. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

22. “We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

23. “When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

24. “Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

25. “A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

26. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

27. “All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase “profound cunning,” has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

28. “Satan – the impersonation of that mixture of the bestial, the malignant, the impious, and the hopeless, which constitute the fiend – the enemy of all that is human and divine.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

29. “As the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so, through social conventionalism, the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

30. “He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

32. “Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

33. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

34. “Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

35. “Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

36. “Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

37. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

38. “If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

39. “Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world. Yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted in the world.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

40. “The streams which would otherwise diverge to fertilize a thousand meadows, must be directed into one deep narrow channel before they can turn a mill.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

41. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

42. “In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose, – a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

43. “There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

44. “Where the vivacity of the intellect and the strength of the passions exceed the development of the moral faculties the character is likely to be embittered or corrupted by extremes, either of adversity or prosperity.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

45. “Now, it is a good sanitary principle, that what is curative is preventive...”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

46. “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.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

47. “In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell nest door to hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

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

— Anna Brownell Jameson

49. “In our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson

50. “Never yet were the feelings and instincts of our nature violated with impunity; never yet was the voice of conscience silenced without retribution.”

— Anna Brownell Jameson