Quotes from Anna Brownell Jameson

A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious.

In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.

The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself.

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.

We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe and just side of a question is the generous and merciful side.

Out of the attempt to harmonize our actual life with our aspirations, our experience with our faith, we make poetry, - or, it may be, religion.

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords-philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love.

Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is like the tinkling cymbal, and when it does not tinkle it jingles, and when it does not jingle, it jars.

If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more.

Occupation was one of the pleasures of paradise, and we cannot be happy without it.

He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.

The streams which would otherwise diverge to fertilize a thousand meadows, must be directed into one deep narrow channel before they can turn a mill.

In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose,--a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of the thought.