Anna Brownell Jameson Quotes

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.

As the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so, through social conventionalism, the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.

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

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

Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

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

Of how many women might the history be comprised in those few words - 'she lived, suffered, and was buried'!

Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.

There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.

Even virtue itself, all perfect as it is, requires to be inspirited by passion; for duties are but coldly performed which are but philosophically fulfilled.

To some characters, fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,--they do well to turn away from it who fear it will turn their heads. But to others fame is "love disguised," the love that answers to love in its widest, most exalted sense.

Morally a woman has a right to the free and entire development of every faculty which God has given her to be improved and used to His honor. Socially she has a right to the protection of equal laws; the right to labor with her hands the thing that is good; to select the kind of labor which is in harmony with her condition and her powers; to exist, if need be, by her labor, or to profit others by it if she choose. These are her rights, not more nor less than the rights of the man.

Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world. Yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted in the world.

Fame is that which is known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds.

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.

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

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

I have great admiration for power, a great terror of weakness, especially in my own sex, yet feel that my love is for those who overcome the mental and moral suffering and temptation through excess of tenderness rather than through excess of strength.

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

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.