Frances Power Cobbe Quotes

Our sex bears the disgrace not only of a great deal of genuine poltroonery, but also of much which is mere affectation.

Ours is the old, old story of every uprising race or class or order. The work of elevation must be wrought by ourselves or not at all.

This specter of the female politician, who abandons her family to neglect for the sake of passing bills in parliament, is just as complete an illusion of the masculine brain, as the other specter whom Sydney Smith laid by a joke,--the woman who would forsake an infant for a quadratic equation.

The time comes to every dog when it ceases to care for people merely for biscuits or bones, or even for caresses, and walks out of doors. When a dog really loves, it prefers the person who gives it nothing, and perhaps is too ill ever to take it out for exercise, to all the liberal cooks and active dog-boys in the world.

So immense are the claims on a mother, physical claims on her bodily and brain vigor, and moral claims on her heart and thoughts, that she cannot ... meet them all and find any large margin beyond for other cares and work. She serves the community in the very best and highest way it is possible to do, by giving birth to healthy children, whose physical strength has not been defrauded, and to whose moral and mental nature she can give the whole of her thoughts.

Men give us most rarely that which we really want, not favor, but - Justice. Nothing is easier than to coax them to pet us like children, nothing more difficult than to persuade them to treat us like responsible human beings.

It is in the faculty of noble, disinterested, unselfish love that lies the true gift and power of womanhood,--a power which makes us, not the equal of men (I never care to claim such equality), but their equivalents; more than their equivalents in a moral sense.

Pleasures of the mind have this advantage,--they never cloy nor wear themselves out, but increase by employment.

If a woman be herself pure and noble-hearted, she will come into every circle as a person does into a heated room, who carries with him the freshness of the woods where he has been walking.

I think it is worse to be poor in mind than in purse, to be stunted and belittled in soul, made a coward, made a liar, made mean and slavish, accustomed to fawn and prevaricate, and "manage" by base arts a husband or a father,--I think this is worse than to be kicked with hobnailed shoes.

The nest may be constructed, so far as the sticks go, by the male bird; but only the hen can line it with moss and down!

It is a woman, and only a woman, — a woman all by herself, if she likes, and without any man to help her, — who can turn a house into a home.

I could discern clearly, even at that early age, the essential difference between people who are kind to dogs and people who really love them.

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

Every woman who has any margin of time or money to spare should adopt some one public interest, some philanthropic undertaking,or some social agitation of reform, and give to that cause whatever time and work she may be able to afford.

Science is but a mere heap of facts, not a golden chain of truths, if we refuse to link it to the throne of God.

[Women's] duty is nothing else than the fulfilment [sic] of the whole moral law, the attainment of every human virtue.

I have often thought how strange it is that men can at once and the same moment cheerfully consign our sex to lives either of narrowest toil or senseless luxury and vanity, and then sneer at the smallness of our aims, the pettiness of our thoughts, the puerility of our conversation!

My great panacea for making society at once better and more enjoyable would be to cultivate greater sincerity.