Top 100 Margaret Fuller Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”

— Margaret Fuller

Featured in: Inspirational Quotes, Leadership Quotes, Quotes About Books And Reading, Learning Quotes, Teacher Quotes

2. “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.”

— Margaret Fuller

Featured in: Education Quotes, Impact Quotes, Knowledge Quotes, Helping Others Quotes, Quotes About Ideas

3. “Nature provides exceptions to every rule.”

— Margaret Fuller

4. “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.”

— Margaret Fuller

Featured in: Birthday Quotes

5. “Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.”

— Margaret Fuller

6. “I accept the universe!”

— Margaret Fuller

7. “Pain has no effect but to steal some of my time.”

— Margaret Fuller

8. “Man is not made for society, but society is made for man. No institution can be good which does not tend to improve the individual.”

— Margaret Fuller

9. “The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.”

— Margaret Fuller

10. “Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.”

— Margaret Fuller

11. “Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.”

— Margaret Fuller

12. “The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.”

— Margaret Fuller

13. “In order that she may be able to give her hand with dignity, she must be able to stand alone.”

— Margaret Fuller

14. “Nature seems to have poured forth her riches so without calculation, merely to mark the fullness of her joy.”

— Margaret Fuller

15. “We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness.”

— Margaret Fuller

16. “Tragedy is always a mistake; and the loneliness of the deepest thinker, the widest lover, ceases to be pathetic to us so soon as the sun is high enough above the mountains.”

— Margaret Fuller

17. “For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.”

— Margaret Fuller

18. “Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.”

— Margaret Fuller

19. “Truth is the nursing mother of genius. No man can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance without becoming original.”

— Margaret Fuller

20. “As to marriage, I think the intercourse of heart and mind may be fully enjoyed without entering into this partnership of daily life.”

— Margaret Fuller

21. “I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”

— Margaret Fuller

22. “There is some danger lest there be no real religion in the heart which craves too much daily sympathy.”

— Margaret Fuller

23. “How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone since they are content with so little.”

— Margaret Fuller

24. “The Arabian horse will not plough well, nor can the plough-horse be rode to play the jereed.”

— Margaret Fuller

25. “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. It is pleasant to be sure of it, because it is undoubtedly the same love that we shall feel when we are angels...”

— Margaret Fuller

26. “There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves.”

— Margaret Fuller

27. “When the intellect and affections are in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep; inspiration will not be confounded with fancy.”

— Margaret Fuller

28. “Not one man, in the million, shall I say? no, not in the hundred million, can rise above the belief that woman was made for man...”

— Margaret Fuller

29. “There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes.”

— Margaret Fuller

30. “Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth.”

— Margaret Fuller

31. “Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural.”

— Margaret Fuller

32. “Amid all your duties, keep some hours to yourself.”

— Margaret Fuller

33. “Truth is the nursing mother of genius.”

— Margaret Fuller

34. “There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see I think that is enough to say about them...”

— Margaret Fuller

35. “This is the method of genius, to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain.”

— Margaret Fuller

36. “Everywhere the fatal spirit of imitation, of reference to European standards, penetrates and threatens to blight whatever of original growth might adorn the soil.”

— Margaret Fuller

37. “The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.”

— Margaret Fuller

38. “Those have not lived who have not seen Rome.”

— Margaret Fuller

39. “A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.”

— Margaret Fuller

40. “Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and the pruning knife.”

— Margaret Fuller

41. “Wine is earth’s answer to the sun.”

— Margaret Fuller

42. “Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself.”

— Margaret Fuller

43. “I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.”

— Margaret Fuller

44. “Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.”

— Margaret Fuller

45. “Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.”

— Margaret Fuller

46. “Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

— Margaret Fuller

47. “Who can ever be alone for a moment in Italy? Every stone has a voice, every grain of dust seems instinct with spirit from the Past, every step recalls some line, some legend of long-neglected lore.”

— Margaret Fuller

48. “I should never stand alone in this desert world, but that manna would drop from heaven, if I would but rise with every rising sun to gather it.”

— Margaret Fuller

49. “With the intellect, I always have-always shall overcome, but that is not half of the work of life. The life-oh my God-shall the life never be sweet?”

— Margaret Fuller

50. “Man can never come up to his ideal standard. It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward. The wisest and greatest men are ever the most modest.”

— Margaret Fuller