Sarah Margaret Fuller Ossoli was an American journalist, editor, critic, translator, and women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. She was the first American female war correspondent, writing for Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune, and full-time book reviewer in journalism. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. These Margaret Fuller quotes will motivate you.
Best Margaret Fuller Quotes
- “If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to woman as freely as to man.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “It was not meant that the soul should cultivate the earth, but that the earth should educate and maintain the soul.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Amid all your duties, keep some hours to yourself.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“There exists in the minds of men a tone of feeling toward women as toward slaves.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “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
- “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
-
“Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. It is pleasant to be sure of it, because it is undoubtedly the same love that we shall feel when we are angels.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Pain has no effect but to steal some of my time.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Man is not made for society, but society is made for man. No institution can be good which does not tend to improve the individual.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Nature provides exceptions to every rule.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“Truth is the first of jewels.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “The especial genius of women I believe to be electrical in movement, intuitive in function, spiritual in tendency.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Very early, I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Tremble not before the free man, but before the slave who has chains to break.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Woman is born for love, and it is impossible to turn her from seeking it.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“Two persons love in one another the future good which they aid one another to unfold.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “What concerns me now is that my life be a beautiful, powerful, in a word, a complete life of its kind.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “All around us lies what we neither understand nor use. Our capacities, our instincts for this our present sphere are but half developed. Let us confine ourselves to that till the lesson be learned; let us be completely natural; before we trouble ourselves with the supernatural. I never see any of these things but I long to get away and lie under a green tree and let the wind blow on me. There is marvel and charm enough in that for me.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “I am suffocated and lost when I have not the bright feeling of progression.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“Artists are always young.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “We need to hear the excuses men make to themselves for their worthlessness.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “It should be remarked that, as the principle of liberty is better understood, and more nobly interpreted, a broader protest is made in behalf of women. As men become aware that few have had a fair chance, they are inclined to say that no women have had a fair chance.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Only the dreamer shall understand realities, though in truth his dreaming must be not out of proportion to his waking.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“The life of the soul is incalculable.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “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
- “Harmony exists no less in difference than in likeness, if only the same key-note govern both parts.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “I am ‘too fiery’… yet I wish to be seen as I am and I would lose all rather than soften away anything.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“In order that she may be able to give her hand with dignity, she must be able to stand alone.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “But the golden-rod is one of the fairy, magical flowers; it grows not up to seek human love amid the light of day, but to mark to the discerning what wealth lies hid in the secret caves of earth.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “There is no wholly masculine man, no purely feminine woman.” ~ 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
- “Beware the mediocrity that threatens middle age, its limitation of thought and interest, its dullness of fancy, its too external life, and mental thinness.” ~ Margaret Fuller Quotes
- “Reverence the highest, have patience with the lowest. Let this day’s performance of the meanest duty be thy religion. Are the stars too distant, pick up the pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the all.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Spirits that have once been sincerely united and tended together a sacred flame, never become entirely stranger to one another’s life.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“Give me truth; cheat me by no illusion.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “While any one is base, none can be entirely free and noble.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Be what you would seem to be.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “As to marriage, I think the intercourse of heart and mind may be fully enjoyed without entering into this partnership of daily life.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “The mind is not, I know, a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “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
-
“I find no intellect comparable to my own” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “For precocity some great price is always demanded sooner or later in life.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “Man tells his aspiration in his God; but in his demon he shows his depth of experience.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “I fear I have not one good word to say this fair morning, though the sun shines so encouragingly on the distant hills and gentle river and the trees are in their festive hues. I am not festive, though contented. When obliged to give myself to the prose of life, as I am on this occasion of being established in a new home I like to do the thing, wholly and quite, – to weave my web for the day solely from the grey yarn.” ~ Margaret Fuller Quotes
- “It is a vulgar error that love, a love, to woman is her whole existence; she is born for Truth and Love in their universal energy” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see I think that is enough to say about them.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“What a difference it makes to come home to a child!” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “The critic is beneath the maker, but is his needed friend. The critic is not a base caviler, but the younger brother of genius. Next to invention is the power of interpreting invention; next to beauty the power of appreciating beauty. And of making others appreciate it.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “I accept the universe!” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “The critic … should be not merely a poet, not merely a philosopher, not merely an observer, but tempered of all three.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “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
- “Drudgery is as necessary to call out the treasures of the mind, as harrowing and planting those of the earth.” ~ Margaret Fuller
-
“Those have not lived who have not seen Rome.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “… the Power who gave a power, by its mere existence, signifies that it must be brought out towards perfection.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “How anyone can remain a Catholic – I mean who has ever been aroused to think, and is not biased by the partialities of childish years – after seeing Catholicism here in Italy I cannot conceive.” ~ Margaret Fuller
- “The highest ideal man can form of his own powers, is that which he is destined to attain. Whatever the soul knows how to seek, it cannot fail to obtain. This is the law and the prophets. Knock and it shall be opened, seek and ye shall find. It is demonstrated; it is a maxim.” ~ Margaret Fuller
