Top 100 Margaret Fuller Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to women as freely as to men. If you ask me what offices they may fill, I reply-any. I do not care what case you put; let them be sea captains, if you will.”

— Margaret Fuller

52. “Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.”

— Margaret Fuller

53. “It seems that it is madder never to abandon one’s self than often to be infatuated; better to be wounded, a captive and a slave, than always to walk in armor.”

— Margaret Fuller

54. “It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth, but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul.”

— Margaret Fuller

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

— Margaret Fuller

56. “What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.”

— Margaret Fuller

57. “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.”

— Margaret Fuller

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

— Margaret Fuller

59. “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

60. “I stand in the sunny noon of life. Objects no longer glitter in the dews of morning, neither are yet softened by the shadows of evening.”

— Margaret Fuller

61. “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

62. “But the golden-rod is one of the fairy, magical flowers; it grows not up to seek human love amid the light of day, but to mark to the discerning what wealth lies hid in the secret caves of earth.”

— Margaret Fuller

63. “Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, despite impediments. But there should be encouragement, and a free genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort, fair play for each in its own kind.”

— Margaret Fuller

64. “Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break.”

— Margaret Fuller

65. “It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.”

— Margaret Fuller

66. “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

67. “Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.”

— Margaret Fuller

68. “Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.”

— Margaret Fuller

69. “Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved. As far as an amiable disposition and powers of entertainment make you so, it is a happiness; but if there is one grain of plausibility, it is poison.”

— Margaret Fuller

70. “The public must learn how to cherish the nobler and rarer plants, and to plant the aloe, able to wait a hundred years for it’s bloom, or it’s garden will contain, presently, nothing but potatoes and pot-herbs.”

— Margaret Fuller

71. “Here, as elsewhere, the gain of creation consists always in the growth of individual minds, which live and aspire, as flowers bloom and birds sing, in the midst of morasses; and in the continual development of that thought, the thought of human destiny, which is given to eternity adequately to express, and which ages of failure only seemingly impede.”

— Margaret Fuller

72. “A great work of Art demands a great thought or a thought of beauty adequately expressed. – Neither in Art nor Literature more than in Life can an ordinary thought be made interesting because well-dressed.”

— Margaret Fuller

73. “To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph-mere stops.”

— Margaret Fuller

74. “Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty.”

— Margaret Fuller

75. “While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.”

— Margaret Fuller

76. “Spirits that have once been sincerely united and tended together a sacred flame, never become entirely stranger to one another’s life.”

— Margaret Fuller

77. “Woman is born for love, and it is impossible to turn her from seeking it.”

— Margaret Fuller

78. “Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical.”

— Margaret Fuller

79. “What a difference it makes to come home to a child!”

— Margaret Fuller

80. “How anyone can remain a Catholic – I mean who has ever been aroused to think, and is not biased by the partialities of childish years – after seeing Catholicism here in Italy I cannot conceive.”

— Margaret Fuller

81. “No temple can still the personal griefs and strifes in the breasts of its visitors.”

— Margaret Fuller

82. “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader. If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it. Very early I knew that the only objective in life was to grow.”

— Margaret Fuller

83. “If anything can be invented more excruciating than an English Opera, such as was the fashion at the time I was in London, I am sure no sin of mine deserves the punishment of bearing it.”

— Margaret Fuller

84. “The soul of the great musician can only be expressed in music.”

— Margaret Fuller

85. “Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day’s performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.”

— Margaret Fuller

86. “All greatness affects different minds, each in its own particular kind, and the variations of testimony mark the truth of feeling.”

— Margaret Fuller

87. “Put up at the moment of greatest suffering a prayer, not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the sovereign spirit will accept thy ransom.”

— Margaret Fuller

88. “Every fact is impure, but every fact contains in it the juices of life. Every fact is a clod, from which may grow an amaranth or a palm.”

— Margaret Fuller

89. “The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.”

— Margaret Fuller

90. “The life of the soul is incalculable.”

— Margaret Fuller

91. “The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose.”

— Margaret Fuller

92. “Life is richly worth living, with its continual revelations of mighty woe, yet infinite hope; and I take it to my breast.”

— Margaret Fuller

93. “Be what you would seem to be.”

— Margaret Fuller

94. “Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.”

— Margaret Fuller

95. “Some degree of expression is necessary for growth, but it should be little in proportion to the full life.”

— Margaret Fuller

96. “A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers.”

— Margaret Fuller

97. “Be what you would seem to be – or, if you’d like it put more simply – a house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.”

— Margaret Fuller

98. “All great expression, which on a superficial survey seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes after a while, to the faithful observer, its own standard by which to appreciate it.”

— Margaret Fuller

99. “Yet, by men in this country, as by the Jews, when Moses was leading them to the promised land, everything has been done that inherited depravity could do, to hinder the promise of Heaven from its fulfilment. The cross, here as elsewhere, has been planted only to be blasphemed by cruelty and fraud.”

— Margaret Fuller

100. “Artists are always young.”

— Margaret Fuller