Quotes from Amos Bronson Alcott

As education becomes inclusive, introspective, cosmic, promoting whole populations to power and privilege, it enthrones a vast, invisible, personal rule over the common mind.

The traveled mind is the catholic mind educated from exclusiveness and egotism.

Sloth is the tempter that beguiles and expels from paradise.

Truth is inclusive of all the virtues, is older than sects and schools, and, like charity, more ancient than mankind.

Despair snuffs the sun from the firmament.

One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.

Pleasure, that immortal essence, the beauteous bead sparkling in the cup, effervesces soon and subsides.

Whoever in a state knows how to form wisely the manners and men and to rule them at home and in war, by excellent institutions, him in the first place above all others I should esteem worthy of honor.

The fable runs that the gods mix our pains and pleasure in one cup, and thus mingle for us the adulterate immortality which we alone are permitted here to enjoy. Voluptuous raptures, could we prolong these at pleasure, would dissipate and dissolve us. A sip is the most that mortals are permitted from any goblet of delight.

Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in man, and finds the readiest response.

Every dogma embodies some shade of truth to give it seeming currency.

An age deficient in idealism has ever been one of immorality and superficial attainment, since without the sense of ideas, nobility of character becomes of rare attainment, if possible.

Pity the mother who assumes the name without being all this implies!

Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.

One cannot celebrate books sufficiently. After saying his best, still something better remains to be spoken in their praise. As with friends, one finds new beauties at every interview, and would stay long in the presence of those choice companions. As with friends, he may dispense with a wide acquaintance. Few and choice. The richest minds need not large libraries.

Anger is the resentment of the animal, and gentle blood alone makes the gentleman.

The finer literature, indeed, is characterized by a certain suffusion of the feminine flavor, the finer, the more ideal, thought plumed with sentiment; even science loves to spring from its feet, philosophy affect the clouds to inspire and edify.

Heaven trims our lamps while we sleep.

Memory marks the horizon of our consciousness, imagination its zenith.

Wherever comes man comes tragedy and comedy also.

A government for protecting the coarser interests of the body, business and bread only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption to decay.

Like birds of passage, the instincts drift the soul adventurously beyond the horizon of sensible things, as if intent on convoying it to the mother country from whence it had flown.

I find my past in my present, and from these forecast my future.

Modesty, that perennial flower planted instinctively in the human breast, blooms therein only as continence guards and virtue keeps.