110+ Margaret Fuller Quotes On Transcendentalism, Enlightened And Pioneering

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. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Margaret Fuller on transcendentalism, enlightened, pioneering.

Top 10 Margaret Fuller Quotes

1. If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.
2. The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.
3. Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
4. Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.
5. 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.
6. Amid all your duties, keep some hours to yourself.
7. It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
8. Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.
9. Men for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
10. A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.

Margaret Fuller Image Quotes

Nature provides exceptions to every rule. — Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller Short Quotes

• There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
• Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.
• I accept the universe!
• 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!
• Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break.
• I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.
• While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.
• Preparations are good in life, prologues ruinous.

Margaret Fuller Quotes About Criticism

Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions. — Margaret Fuller

The critic ... should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three. — Margaret Fuller

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. — Margaret Fuller

The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work. — Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller Quotes About Live

Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot and the pruning knife. — Margaret Fuller

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

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

If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only be cured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up. — Margaret Fuller

Those have not lived who have not seen Rome. — Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller Quotes About Mind

Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth. — Margaret Fuller

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

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

The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open. — Margaret Fuller

There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves. — Margaret Fuller

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage. — Margaret Fuller

All greatness affects different minds, each in its own particular kind, and the variations of testimony mark the truth of feeling. — Margaret Fuller

Margaret Fuller Famous Quotes And Sayings

Nature provides exceptions to every rule. — Margaret Fuller

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

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

Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking. — Margaret Fuller

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

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 — Margaret Fuller

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. — Margaret Fuller

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

What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind. — Margaret Fuller

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

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

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

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. — Margaret Fuller

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

I am 'too fiery'... yet I wish to be seen as I am and I would lose all rather than soften away anything. — Margaret Fuller

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. — Margaret Fuller

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

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. — Margaret Fuller

The persons whom you have idolized can never, in the end, be ungrateful, and, probably, at the time of retreat they still do justice to your heart. But, so long as you must draw persons too near you, a temporary recoil is sure to follow. It is the character striving to defend itself from a heating and suffocating action upon it. — Margaret Fuller

Union is only possible to those who are units. To be fit for relations in time, souls, whether of man or woman, must be able to do without them in the spirit. — Margaret Fuller

Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. — Margaret Fuller

There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. — Margaret Fuller

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

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

Our desires, once realized, haunt us again less readily. — Margaret Fuller

Let every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself — Margaret Fuller

The Greeks saw everything in forms which we are trying to ascertain as law, and classify as cause. — Margaret Fuller

there is such a rebound from parental influence that it generally seems that the child makes use of the directions given by the parent only to avoid the prescribed path. — Margaret Fuller

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

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

I find no intellect comparable to my own — Margaret Fuller

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

... the Power who gave a power, by its mere existence, signifies that it must be brought out towards perfection. — Margaret Fuller

This is the method of genius, to ripen fruit for the crowd by those rays of whose heat they complain. — Margaret Fuller

After having admired the women of Rome, say to yourself, 'I too am beautiful!' ... In you I met a real person. I need not give you any other praise. — Margaret Fuller

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

What I mean by the Muse is that unimpeded clearness of the intuitive powers, which a perfectly truthful adherence to every admonition of the higher instincts would bring to a finely organized human being. It may appear as prophesy or as poesy...should these faculties have free play, I believe they will open up new, deeper and purer sources of joyous inspiration than have as yet refreshed the earth. — Margaret Fuller

When the intellect and affections are in harmony; when intellectual consciousness is calm and deep; inspiration will not be confounded with fancy. — Margaret Fuller

Some degree of expression is necessary for growth, but it should be little in proportion to the full life. — Margaret Fuller

It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth, but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul. — Margaret Fuller

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

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

There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood. — Margaret Fuller

No temple can still the personal griefs and strifes in the breasts of its visitors. — Margaret Fuller

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

The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose. — Margaret Fuller

Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion. — Margaret Fuller

We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man. — Margaret Fuller

Pain has no effect but to steal some of my time. — Margaret Fuller

The Arabian horse will not plough well, nor can the plough-horse be rode to play the jereed. — Margaret Fuller

Truth is the nursing mother of genius. — Margaret Fuller

The only woman to whom it has been given to touch what is decisive in the present world and to have a presentiment of the world of the future. — Margaret Fuller

Woman is born for love, and it is impossible to turn her from seeking it. — Margaret Fuller

I know of no inquiry which the impulses of man suggests that is forbidden to the resolution of man to pursue. — Margaret Fuller

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

Nature seems to have poured forth her riches so without calculation, merely to mark the fullness of her joy. — Margaret Fuller

You see how wide the gulf that separates me from the Christian church. — Margaret Fuller

There is some danger lest there be no real religion in the heart which craves too much daily sympathy. — Margaret Fuller

Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts. — Margaret Fuller

Spirits that have once been sincerely united and tended together a sacred flame, never become entirely stranger to one another's life. — Margaret Fuller

Artists are always young. — Margaret Fuller

Be what you would seem to be. — Margaret Fuller

The soul of the great musician can only be expressed in music. — Margaret Fuller

Who does not observe the immediate glow and security that is diffused over the life of woman, before restless or fretful, by engaging in gardening, building, or the lowest department of art? Here is something that is not routine--something that draws forth life towards the infinite. — Margaret Fuller

How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone since they are content with so little. — Margaret Fuller

The life of the soul is incalculable. — Margaret Fuller

Our friends should be our incentives to right, but not only our guiding, but our prophetic, stars. To love by right is much, to love by faith is more; both are the entire love, without which heart, mind, and soul cannot be alike satisfied. We love and ought to love one another, not merely for the absolute worth of each, but on account of a mutual fitness of temporary character. — Margaret Fuller

The highest ideal man can form of his own powers, is that which he is destined to attain. Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain. This is the law and the prophets. Knock and it shall be opened, seek and ye shall find. It is demonstrated; it is a maxim. — Margaret Fuller

We cannot have expression till there is something to be expressed. — Margaret Fuller

Let no one dare to call another mad who is not himself willing to rank in the same class for every perversion and fault of judgment. Let no one dare aid in punishing another as criminal who is not willing to suffer the penalty due to his own offenses. — Margaret Fuller

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

Truth is the first of jewels. — Margaret Fuller

Wine is earth's answer to the sun. — Margaret Fuller

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! — Margaret Fuller

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. — Margaret Fuller

Life Lessons by Margaret Fuller

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.