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Margaret Fuller Quotes
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Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli , commonly known as Margaret Fuller, was an American journalist, editor, critic, and women's rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first full-time American female book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States.

Born Sarah Margaret Fuller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, she was given a substantial early education by her father, Timothy Fuller, who died in 1835 due to cholera. She later had more formal schooling and became a teacher before, in 1839, she began overseeing her Conversations series: classes for women meant to compensate for their lack of access to higher education. She became the first editor of the transcendentalist journal The Dial in 1840, which was the year her writing career started to succeed, before joining the staff of the New York Tribune under Horace Greeley in 1844. By the time she was in her 30s, Fuller had earned a reputation as the best-read person in New England, male or female, and became the first woman allowed to use the library at Harvard College. Her seminal work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1845. A year later, she was sent to Europe for the Tribune as its first female correspondent. She soon became involved with the revolutions in Italy and allied herself with Giuseppe Mazzini. She had a relationship with Giovanni Ossoli, with whom she had a child. All three members of the family died in a shipwreck off Fire Island, New York, as they were traveling to the United States in 1850. Fuller's body was never recovered.

Fuller was an advocate of women's rights and, in particular, women's education and the right to employment. This is shown when she revolted against Boston-Cambridge’s learned professions as she was barred as for entering as a girl. Fuller, along with Coleridge, wanted to stay free of what she called the “strong mental oder” of female teachers . She also encouraged many other reforms in society, including prison reform and the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Many other advocates for women's rights and feminism, including Susan B. Anthony, cite Fuller as a source of inspiration. Many of her contemporaries, however, were not supportive, including her former friend Harriet Martineau. She said that Fuller was a talker rather than an activist. Shortly after Fuller's death, her importance faded; the editors who prepared her letters to be published, believing her fame would be short-lived, censored or altered much of her work before publication. Wikipedia  

✵ 23. May 1810 – 19. July 1850
Margaret Fuller photo
Margaret Fuller: 116   quotes 28   likes

Margaret Fuller Quotes

“Might the simple maxim, that honesty is the best policy be laid to heart! Might a sense of the true aims of life elevate the tone of politics and trade, till public and private honor become identical!”

Margaret Fuller

Summer On The Lakes, in 1843 (1844) http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11526.

Life , Sense , Heart

“It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.”

Margaret Fuller

Notes from Cambridge, Massachusetts (July 1842) published in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), Vol. II, p. 64.

Wisdom

“There are who separate the eternal light
In forms of man and woman, day and night;
They cannot bear that God be essence quite.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

God , Light , Night

“I now know all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own.”

Margaret Fuller

As reported by Ralph Waldo Emerson in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1884) Vol. 1, Pt. 4.
Of this comment Perry Miller states "the fact is that at Emerson's table she was speaking the truth." "I find no intellect comparable to my own" in American Heritage magazine, Vol. 8, Issue 2 (February 1957) http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1957/2/1957_2_22.shtml.

People

“Put up at the moment of greatest suffering a prayer, not for thy own escape, but for the enfranchisement of some being dear to thee, and the sovereign spirit will accept thy ransom.”

Margaret Fuller

"Recipe to prevent the cold of January from utterly destroying life" (30 January 1841), quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 97.

Suffering

“I do not think we are deceived to grow,
But that the crudest fancy, slightest show,
Covers some separate truth that we may know.

In the one Truth, each separate fact is true;
Eternally in one I many view,
And destinies through destiny pursue.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

Truth , Thinking

“The shrine is vowed to freedom, but, my friend,
Freedom is but a means to gain an end.
Freedom should build the temple, but the shrine
Be consecrate to thought still more divine.
The human bliss which angel hopes foresaw
Is liberty to comprehend the law.
Give, then, thy book a larger scope and frame,
Comprising means and end in Truth's great name.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Freedom and Truth

Truth , Books , Law , Hope

“Knights of the Rosy Cross, they bore
Its weight within the heart, but wore
Without, devotion's sign in glistening ruby bright;
The gall and vinegar they drank alone,
But to the world at large would only own
The wine of faith, sparkling with rosy light.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Sub Rosa, Crux

World , Faith , Light , Wine

“Be what you would seem to be.”

Margaret Fuller

English proverb, used by many authors, including some prior to Margaret Fuller's time; Thomas Fuller expresses related thoughts in his "Panegyric" on Charles II, Section 21" in The History of the Worthies of England (1662):
Be you above your ancestors renown'd,
Whose goodness wisely doth your greatness bound;
And, knowing that you may be what you would,
Are pleased to be only what you should.
Misattributed

“A many-colored light flows from our sun;
Art, 'neath its beams a motley thread has spun;
The prison modifies the perfect day;
But thou hast known such mediums to shun,
And cast once more on life a pure white ray.
Absorbed in the creations of thy mind,
Forgetting daily self, my truest friend I find.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Flaxman

Life , Art , Color , Light

“To me, our destinies seem flower and fruit
Born of an ever-generating root…”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

Flowers

“Let no one dare to call another mad who is not himself willing to rank in the same class for every perversion and fault of judgment. Let no one dare aid in punishing another as criminal who is not willing to suffer the penalty due to his own offenses.”

Margaret Fuller

Article, The New York Daily Tribune (22 February 1845), p. 19; quoted in Brilliant Bylines (1986) by Barbara Belford.

Penalty , Suffering , Madness

“Beware of over-great pleasure in being popular or even beloved.”

Margaret Fuller

Letter to her brother, (20 December 1840) as quoted in The Feminist Papers (1973) by Alice Rossi.

Pleasure

“When your dreams tire, they go underground and out of kindness that's where they stay.”

Margaret Fuller

Libby Houston, in the poem "Gold" in Necessity (1988).
Misattributed

Dreams

“Heroes have filled the zodiac of beneficent labors, and then given up their mortal part to the fire without a murmur. Sages and lawgivers have bent their whole nature to the search for truth, and thought themselves happy if they could buy, with the sacrifice of all temporal ease and pleasure, one seed for the future Eden. Poets and priests have strung the lyre with heart-strings, poured out their best blood upon the altar which, reare'd anew from age to age, shall at last sustain the flame which rises to highest heaven. What shall we say of those who, if not so directly, or so consciously, in connection with the central truth, yet, led and fashioned by a divine instinct, serve no less to develop and interpret the open secret of love passing into life, the divine energy creating for the purpose of happiness; — of the artist, whose hand, drawn by a preexistent harmony to a certain medium, moulds it to expressions of life more highly and completely organized than are seen elsewhere, and, by carrying out the intention of nature, reveals her meaning to those who are not yet sufficiently matured to divine it; of the philosopher, who listens steadily for causes, and, from those obvious, infers those yet unknown; of the historian, who, in faith that all events must have their reason and their aim, records them, and lays up archives from which the youth of prophets may be fed. The man of science dissects the statement, verifies the facts, and demonstrates connection even where he cannot its purpose·”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Love , Life , Pleasure , Truth

“Your prudence, my wise friend, allows too little room for the mysterious whisperings of life.”

Margaret Fuller

To Ralph Waldo Emerson, as quoted in "Humanity, said Edgar Allan Poe, is divided into Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller" Joseph Jay Deiss in American Heritage magazine, Vol. 23, Issue 5 (August 1972).

Life

“Guard thee from the power of evil;
Who cannot trust, vows to the devil.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), My Seal-Ring

Evil

“When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it.”

Margaret Fuller

Margaret Chase Smith, quoted in More Than Petticoats : Remarkable Maine Women (2005) by Kate Kennedy
Misattributed

People

“Triune, shaping, restless power,
Life-flow from life's natal hour,
No music chords are in thy sound;
By some thou'rt but a rattle found;
Yet, without thy ceaseless motion,
To ice would turn their dead devotion.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Sistrum

Life , Music , Dead

“Though deepest dark our efforts should enfold,
Unwearied mine to find the vein of gold;
Forget not oft to lift the hope on high;
The rosy dawn again shall fill the sky.

And by that lovely light, all truth-revealed,
The cherished forms which sad distrust concealed,
Transfigured, yet the same, will round us stand,
The kindred angels of a faithful band;
Ruby and ebon cross both cast aside,
No lamp is needed, for the night has died.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Sub Rosa, Crux

Love , Truth , Sadness , Faith

“Safety is not to be secured, then, by the wisest foresight. I shall embark more composedly in our merchant-ship, praying fervently, indeed, that it may not be my lot to lose my boy at sea, either by unsolaced illness, or amid the howling waves; or, if so, that Ossoli, Angelo, and I may go together, and that the anguish may be brief.”

Margaret Fuller

Letter (21 April 1850).
Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852)

Boy , Sea

“We will worship by impromptu symbols, till the religion is framed for all Humanity. The beauty grows around us daily, the trees are now all in blossom and some of the vines; there is a Crown Imperial just in perfection, to which I paid my evening worship by the light of the fire, which reached to us, and there are flashes of lightening too. But I do not like the lightening so well as once, having been in too great danger. Yet just now a noble flash falls upon my paper, it ought to have noble thoughts to illumine, instead of these little nothings, but indeed to-night I write only to say: thou dear, dear friend, and we must must meet soon.”

Margaret Fuller

Letter IV to James Nathan (March 1845).
The Love Letters Of Margaret Fuller (1903)

Religion , Beauty , Tree , Light

“In times of old, as we are told,
When men more child-like at the feet
Of Jesus sat, than now,
A chivalry was known more bold
Than ours, and yet of stricter vow,
Of worship more complete.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), Sub Rosa, Crux

Men , Time

“Wouldst have the princely spirit bowed?
Whisper only, speak not loud,
Mark and leave him in the crowd.

Thou need'st not spies nor jailers have;
The free will serve thee like the slave,
Coward shrinking from the brave.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The Captured Wild Horse

“Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience; and casts light into the cavern through which he worked his cause up to the cheerful day.”

Margaret Fuller

As quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 289-91.

God , Light

“There are to whom each symbol is a mask;
The life of love is a mysterious task;
They want no answer, for they would not ask.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

Love , Life

“We doubt not the destiny of our country — that she is to accomplish great things for human nature, and be the mother of a nobler race than the world has yet known. But she has been so false to the scheme made out at her nativity, that it is now hard to say which way that destiny points.”

Margaret Fuller

"American Facts" in Life Without and Life Within (1860) edited by Arthur Buckminster Fuller, p. 108.

World , Way , Nature , Falseness

“The use of criticism, in periodical writing, is to sift, not to stamp a work.”

Margaret Fuller

"A Short Essay on Critics" in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 5.

“Were the destiny of woman thus exactly marked out, did she invariably retain the shelter of a parent’s or guardian’s roof till she married, did marriage give her a sure home and a protector, were she never liable to be made a widow, or, if so, sure of finding immediate protection from a brother or new husband, so that she might never be forced to stand alone one moment, and were her mind given for this world only, with no faculties capable of eternal growth and infinite improvement, we would still demand of her a far wider and more generous culture than is proposed by those who so anxiously define her sphere.”

Margaret Fuller

Article, The New York Daily Tribune (30 September 1845); quoted in Brilliant Bylines (1986) by Barbara Belford.

Marriage , World , Home , Parent

“For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.”

Margaret Fuller

As quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 289.

Life

“I am 'too fiery' … yet I wish to be seen as I am, and would lose all rather than soften away anything.”

Margaret Fuller

As quoted by Joseph Jay Deiss in "Humanity, said Edgar Allan Poe, is divided into Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller" in American Heritage magazine, Vol. 23, Issue 5 (August 1972) http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/ah/1972/5/1972_5_42.shtml.

“How many persons must there be who cannot worship alone since they are content with so little.”

Margaret Fuller

Letter to Rev. W. H. Channing (31 December 1843) quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 184.

Personality

“Essays, entitled critical, are epistles addressed to the public, through which the mind of the recluse relieves itself of its impressions.”

Margaret Fuller

"A Short Essay on Critics" in Art, Literature and the Drama (1858).

“This is my tendency; but can I say
That this my thought leads the true, only way?
I only know it constant leads, and I obey.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

Way

“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

"The Modern Drama" in Art, Literature and the Drama (1858).

“Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering-pot and pruning-knife.”

Margaret Fuller

"Life of Sir James Mackintosh" in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 50.

Water , Training

“There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Women , Men , Feeling

“You ask a faith, — they are content with faith;
You ask to have, — but they reply "IT hath."
There is no end, there need be no path.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

Faith

“Plants of great vigor will almost always struggle into blossom, despite impediments. But there should be encouragement, and a free genial atmosphere for those of more timid sort, fair play for each in its own kind.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

“Art can only be truly art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life.”

Margaret Fuller

Part II, Things and Thoughts of Europe, p. 198.
At Home And Abroad (1856)

Life , Art

“The day wears heavily, — why, then, ignore it;
Peace is the soul's desire, — such thoughts restore it;
The truth thou art, — it needs not implore it.”

Margaret Fuller

Life Without and Life Within (1859), The One In All

Truth , Peace , Art , Soul

“To one who has enjoyed the full life of any scene, of any hour, what thoughts can be recorded about it, seem like the commas and semicolons in the paragraph, mere stops.”

Margaret Fuller

Source: , in 1843 (1844), p. 10.

Life

“Let it not be said, wherever there is energy or creative genius, 'She has a masculine mind.'
This by no means argues a willing want of generosity toward Woman. Man is as generous towards her as he knows how to be. Wherever she has herself arisen in national or private history, and nobly shone forth in any form of excellence, men have received her, not only willingly, but with triumph.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Men , History

“I accept the universe.”

Margaret Fuller

As quoted in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JamVari.html by William James
Gad! She'd better. - response of Thomas Carlyle

Universe

“Every relation, every gradation of nature is incalculably precious, but only to the soul which is poised upon itself, and to whom no loss, no change, can bring dull discord, for it is in harmony with the central soul. If any individual live too much in relations, so that he becomes a stranger to the resources of his own nature, he falls, after a while, into a distraction, or imbecility, from which he can only becured by a time of isolation, which gives the renovating fountains time to rise up. With a society it is the same.”

Margaret Fuller book Woman in the Nineteenth Century

Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Soul , Loss , Time , Nature