Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it; there are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains; and there are wise people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to carve out their own purposes.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Opinion
A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility, as from the want of sense.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Fools
Occupation was one of the pleasures of paradise, and we cannot be happy without it.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Occupation, Work
Never was the voice of conscience silenced without retribution.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Punishment
What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are.—The mere aspiration, by changing the frame and spirit of the mind, for the moment realizes itself.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Aspirations
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.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Fear
No one’s enemy but his own, is generally the enemy of everybody with whom he is in relation.—His leading quality is a reckless imprudence, and a selfish pursuit of selfish enjoyments, independent of all consequences.—He runs rapidly through his means; calls, in a friendly way, on his friends, for bonds, bail, and securities; involves his nearest kin; leaves his wife a beggar, and quarters his orphans on the public; and after enjoying himself to his last guinea, entails a life of dependence upon his progeny, and dies in the ill-understood reputation of harmless folly which is more usurious to society than some positive crimes.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Enemies
All government and exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based on love, and directed by knowledge, is tyranny.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Government
Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Poverty
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.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Passion
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.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Absence
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!
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Virtue
The true purpose of education is to cherish and unfold the seed of immortality already sown within us; to develop, to their fullest extent, the capacities of every kind with which the God who made us has endowed us.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
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.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Generosity
Avarice is to the intellect and heart, what sensuality is to the morals.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
A lie, though it be killed and dead, can sting sometimes,—like a dead wasp.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Lying
Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth
—Anna Brownell Jameson
We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Understanding
Virtue is the habitual sense of right, and the habitual courage to act up to that sense of right, combined with benevolent sympathies, and the charity which thinketh no evil. The union of the highest conscience and highest sympathy fulfils my notion of virtue.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Virtue
How often in this world are the actions that we condemn the result of sentiments that we love, and opinions that we admire.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man; youth never.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Childhood, Children
Modesty and chastity are twins
—Anna Brownell Jameson
It is not poverty so much as pretence, that harasses a ruined man—the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse,—the keeping up of a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Poverty
In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose, a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of thought.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Art
All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase “profound cunning” has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or, on some points, diseased.
—Anna Brownell Jameson
Topics: Cunning
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