Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) was an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with young students, focusing on a conversational style, and avoided traditional punishment. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end, advocated a vegan diet before the term was coined. He was also an abolitionist and an advocate for women’s rights.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Amos Bronson Alcott
A work of real merit finds favor at last.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Appreciation, Work
Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament, and this paradise is not secure until children appear to animate and complete the picture.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Family
Our bravest and best lessons are not learned through success, but through misadventure.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Life, Misfortune
Nor is a day lived, if the dawn is left out of it, with the prospects it opens.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Morning
Sympathy wanting, all is wanting.—Personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Sympathy
That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Books, Expectations, Reading
The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Teaching, Learning, Teachers, Education
Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Perception, Education
Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Persuasion
One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books, though preparation is necessary to profitable reading; and the less reading is better than more:—book-struck men are of all readers least wise, however knowing or learned.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Reading
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken, we moderns are building houses for them.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Ideas
Where there is a mother in the home, matters go well.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Mothers, Family, Mother
Debate is masculine, conversation is feminine.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: One liners, Conversation
Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvest reaps.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Gardening
Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Friendship, Friends
The eyes have a property in things and territories not named in any title-deeds, and are the owners of our choicest possessions.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Eyes
The less of routine, the more of life.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Order
We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Success, Success & Failure, Disappointment, Failure
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Age, Aging
A man defines his standing at the court of chastity, by his views of women.—He cannot be any man’s friend, nor his own, if not hers.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams, and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Virtue, Country
Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon; of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Nature
I consider it the best part of an education to have been born and brought up in the country.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Country
The less routine the more life.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Life, Living
First find the man in yourself if you will inspire manliness in others.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Inspiration
The travelled mind is the catholic mind, educated out of exclusiveness and egotism.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Travel
Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, Thinking
To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of ignorance.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Ignorance
Many can argue; not many converse
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Arguments
While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot feel old, no matter what his years may be.
—Amos Bronson Alcott
Topics: Age, Aging, Time
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