Margaret Fuller (1810–50,) fully Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli, was an American woman’s rights activist, journalist, transcendentalist, literary critic, and editor. Her efforts to refine the taste and enrich the lives of her contemporaries make her significant in the history of American culture.
Born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, Fuller was educated by her father before attending the local school at age 14. She went on to teach in Boston (1836–37) and Providence (1837–39.) There she assumed a significant role in the transcendentalist clique that centered on Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In 1839–44, Fuller conducted a series of conversations and seminars for educated women in Boston. One of the outcomes of these discussions was her landmark feminist work Women in the Nineteenth Century (1845,) which contends that women as a spiritual being should be liberated from male-imposed social restrictions.
From 1840–42, she was the editor of The Dial, the transcendentalist journal, and in 1844 went to New York, where she became a literary critic for the New York Tribune. Moving to Italy in 1847, she worked as a foreign correspondent and while there, met and married Marquis Giovanni Ossoli, an Italian nobleman and republican.
After becoming involved in the unsuccessful 1848 Revolution in France, Fuller sailed for New York with her husband and infant son, but the ship was wrecked in a storm off New York’s Fire Island, and all aboard were drowned.
Fuller’s other publications include Summer on the Lakes (1844.) Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Henry Channing, and James Freeman Clarke compiled her Memoirs (1852.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Margaret Fuller
Melancholy attends the best joys of an ideal life.
—Margaret Fuller
Man can never come up to his ideal standard.—It is the nature of the immortal spirit to raise that standard higher and higher as it goes from strength to strength, still upward and onward.—The wisest and greatest men are ever the most modest.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Ideals
It does not follow because many books are written by persons born in America that there exists an American literature. Books which imitate or represent the thoughts and life of Europe do not constitute an American literature. Before such can exist, an original idea must animate this nation and fresh currents of life must call into life fresh thoughts along the shore.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Reading, Books
Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Love
Truth is the nursing mother of genius? No man true can be absolutely true to himself, eschewing cant, compromise, servile imitation, and complaisance without becoming original.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Truth
It is not because the touch of genius has roused genius to production, but because the admiration of genius has made talent ambitious, that the harvest is still so abundant.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Genius
Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Aspirations
Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Criticism, Critics
There are two modes of criticism. One which crushes to earth without mercy all the humble buds of Phantasy, all the plants that, though green and fruitful, are also a prey to insects or have suffered by drought. It weeds well the garden, and cannot believe the weed in its native soil may be a pretty, graceful plant. There is another mode which enters into the natural history of every thing that breathes and lives, which believes no impulse to be entirely in vain, which scrutinizes circumstances, motive and object before it condemns, and believes there is a beauty in natural form, if its law and purpose be understood.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Criticism, Critics
Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Birthdays
The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Women, Spirituality
Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind as harrowing and planting those of the earth.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Boredom
I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Progress
I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage and prevented it her sex from being what it should be to itself or the other. I wish woman to live, first for God’s sake. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then if she finds what she needs in man embodied, she will know how to love and be worthy of being loved.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Sex
Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Popularity
Men, for the sake of getting a living forget to live.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Life, Relaxation, Living, Work, Stress, Carpe-diem
A house is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Reading, Books
Nature provides exceptions to every rule.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Nature
Reverence the highest; have patience with the lowest; let this day’s performance of the meanest duty be thy religion.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Duty
Would that the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy, might be laid to heart; that a sense of the true aim of life might elevate the tone of politics and trade till public and private honor become identical.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Honor
One hour of love will teach a woman more of her true relations than all your philosophizing.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Love
Male and female represent the two sides of the great radical dualism. But in fact they are perpetually passing into one another. Fluid hardens to solid, solid rushes to fluid. There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Men & Women
A home is no home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as for the body. For human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion. If they do not get it in one way, they must in another, or perish.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Home
It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Reality
I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: America
Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty.
—Margaret Fuller
Topics: Appreciation
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