Margaret Fuller was an American journalist, critic, and women’s rights activist. She was a major figure in the American Transcendentalist movement and wrote the first book by an American woman on women’s rights, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). She was a key figure in the feminist movement of the mid-19th century and was a vocal advocate for the rights of women.
What is the most famous quote by Margaret Fuller ?
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.
— Margaret Fuller
What can you learn from Margaret Fuller (Life Lessons)
- Margaret Fuller taught that we should strive to live life to the fullest and be true to ourselves, no matter what society tells us. She believed that each individual is capable of achieving greatness and that it is important to recognize the potential within.
- She also encouraged us to think for ourselves, to question authority and to fight for our rights. She believed in the power of education and self-improvement and that knowledge is the key to success.
- Finally, Margaret Fuller taught us to be compassionate, to treat others with respect and to always be open to new ideas and perspectives. She taught us to be open-minded and to seek out new experiences, as these can help us grow and develop.
The most useful Margaret Fuller quotes that will transform you to a better person
Following is a list of the best Margaret Fuller quotes, including various Margaret Fuller inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Margaret Fuller.
The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.
Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles with it.
Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.
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.
Amid all your duties, keep some hours to yourself.
It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.
Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.
A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
Enlightened quotes by Margaret Fuller
Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
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.
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.
There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.
Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and the pruning knife.
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.
Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.
Quotations by Margaret Fuller that are pioneering and influential
I accept the universe!
It is a vulgar error that love, a love, to woman is her whole existence; she is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy
For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.
Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.
What a difference it makes to come home to a child!
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.
It should be remarked that, as the principle of liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of women. As men become aware that few have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.
What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.
Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break.
I am 'too fiery'... yet I wish to be seen as I am and I would lose all rather than soften away anything.
Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth.
Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.
I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.
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.
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.
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.
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.
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.
Most marvelous and enviable is that fecundity of fancy which can adorn whatever it touches, which can invest naked fact and dry reasoning with unlooked-for beauty, make flowers bloom even on the brow of the precipice, and, when nothing better can be had, can turn the very substance of rock itself into moss and lichens. This faculty is uncomparingly the most important for the vivid and attractive exhibition of truth to the minds of men.
Life is richly worth living, with its continual revelations of mighty woe, yet infinite hope; and I take it to my breast.
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.
While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.
We doubt not the destiny of our country that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points.
When the intellect and affections are in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep; inspiration will not be confounded with fancy.
There is some danger lest there be no real religion in the heart which craves too much daily sympathy.
With the intellect I always have always shall overcome, but that is not the half of the work. The life, the life Oh my God! shall the life never be sweet!
I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage and prevented it her sex from being what it should be to itself or the other. I wish woman to live, first for God's sake. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then if she finds what she needs in man embodied, she will know how to love and be worthy of being loved.
The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. The critic is not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. And of making others appreciate it.
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.
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.
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.
The soul of the great musician can only be expressed in music.