James Wood, comp. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899.
A. B. Alcott
A government for protecting business and bread only is but a carcase, and soon falls by its own corruption to decay.
A sip is the most that mortals are permitted from any goblet of delight.
A work of real merit finds favour at last.
Character is a fact, and that is much in a world of pretence and concession.
Civilisation degrades the many to exalt the few.
Conversation is an abandonment to ideas, a surrender to persons.
Debate is masculine, conversation is feminine; the former angular, the latter circular and radiant of the underlying unity.
Divination seems heightened to its highest power in woman.
Education may work wonders as well in warping the genius of individuals as in seconding it.
Egotists cannot converse; they talk to themselves only.
Enthusiasm imparts itself magnetically, and fuses all into one happy and harmonious unity of feeling and sentiment.
Every man is his own greatest dupe.
Experience converts us to ourselves when books fail us.
Fine manners are the mantle of fair minds. None are truly great without this ornament.
Friends are the leaders of the bosom, being more ourselves than we are, and we complement our affections in theirs.
Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen, the more select the more enjoyable.
Good discourse sinks differences and seeks agreements.
Health, longevity, beauty are other names for personal purity, and temperance is the regimen for all.
Heaven trims our lamps while we sleep.
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken, we moderns are building houses for them.
In things pertaining to enthusiasm, no man is sane who does not know how to be insane on proper occasions.
Inspiration must find answering inspiration.
It is easier to carry the world in one’s thoughts than on one’s shoulders.
It needs a man to perceive a man.
Life is too much for most. So much of age, so little of youth; living, for the most part, in the moment, and dating existence by the memory of its burdens.
Manners carry the world for the moment, character for all time.
Many can argue, not many converse.
Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators.
One must have lived greatly whose record would bear the full light of day from its beginning to its close.
One’s piety is best displayed in his pursuits.
Our dreams drench us in sense, and sense steeps us again in dreams.
Our ideals are our better selves.
Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its centre and ornament. Nor is there a paradise planted till the children appear in the foreground to animate and complete the picture.
Success is sweet; the sweeter if long delayed, and attained through manifold struggles and defeats.
Sympathy wanting, all is wanting; its personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that lights our atoms, puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
The less routine the more of life.
The richest minds need not large libraries.
The surest sign of age is loneliness.
There are truths that shield themselves behind veils, and are best spoken by implication. Even the sun veils himself in his own rays to blind the gaze of the too curious starer.
Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.
Where there is a mother in the home, matters speed well.
Who knows the mind has the key to all things else.
Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in man, and finds the readiest response.
With temperance, health, cheerfulness, friends, a chosen task, one pays the cheapest fees for living, and may well dispense with other physicians.