Anna Brownell Jameson Quotes

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.

Thoughts and emotions which never perhaps were in the mind of the artist, never were anticipated, never were intended by him - may be strongly suggested by his work. This is an important part of the morals of art, which we must never lose sight of. Art is not only for pleasure and profit, but for good and for evil.

As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character.

Where the vivacity of the intellect and the strength of the passions exceed the development of the moral faculties the character is likely to be embittered or corrupted by extremes, either of adversity or prosperity.

I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism.

Chill penury weighs down the heart itself; and though it sometimes be endured with calmness, it is but the calmness of despair.

The streams which would otherwise diverge to fertilize a thousand meadows, must be directed into one deep narrow channel before they can turn a mill.

Modesty and chastity are twins

Talk without truth is the hollow brass; talk without love is like the tinkling cymbal, and when it does not tinkle it jingles, and when it does not jingle, it jars.

Never yet were the feelings and instincts of our nature violated with impunity; never yet was the voice of conscience silenced without retribution.

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

Avarice is to the intellect what sensuality is to the morals

Now, it is a good sanitary principle, that what is curative is preventive ...

Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love.

There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities ties which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts.

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.

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.

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.

The primitve Christians, by laying so much stress upon a future life in contradiction to this life, and placing the lower creatures out of the pale of sympathy, and thus had the foundation for this utter disregard of animals in the light of our fellow creatures.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.

A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.

Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.

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

Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.

Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.

A cunning mind emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning.

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

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

In our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.

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

A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.

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

Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust.

How often we have had cause to regret that the histrionic art, of all the fine arts the most intense in its immediate effect, should be, of all others, the most transient in its result! - and the only memorials it can leave behind, at best, so imperfect and so unsatisfactory!

You must never believe what the newspapers say. I stand aghast at the impudence of the lies they contain, things not only false in fact, but absolutely impossible.

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

In every mind where there is a strong tendency to fear there is a strong capacity to hate. Those who dwell in fear dwell nest door to hate; and I think it is the cowardice of women which makes them such intense haters.

Opinion has ever been stronger than law.

Nature is boundless in her powers, exhausting in her variety: the powers of Art and its capabilities of variety in production are bounded on every side. Nature herself, the infinite, has circumscribed the bounds of finite Art. The one is the divinity; the other the priestess.

Violet, the amethyst, signified love and truth; or passion and suffering.

To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another.