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ALCOTT, Amos BronsON QUOTES
(1799-1888), American educator
When one becomes indifferent to women, to children, and to young people, he may know that he is superannuated, and has withdrawn from what is sweetest and purest in human existence.
While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot feel old, no matter what his years may be.
A work of real merit finds favor at last.
We do not accept as genuine the person not characterized by this blushing bashfulness, this youthfulness of heart, this sensibility to the sentiment of suavity and self-respect. Modesty is bred of self-reverence.—Fine manners are the the mantle of fair minds.—None are truly great without this ornament.
That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
A man defines his standing at the court of chastity, by his views of women. —He cannot be any man's friend, nor his own, if not hers.
There is virtue in country houses, in gardens and orchards, in fields, streams, and groves, in rustic recreations and plain manners, that neither cities nor universities enjoy.
I consider it the best part of an education to have been born and brought up in the country.
We mount to heaven mostly on tha ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.
Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament.—Nor is there a paradise planted till the children appear in the foreground to animate and complete the picture.
Observation more than books, experience rather than persons, are the prime educators.
We mount to heaven mostly on the ruins of our cherished schemes, finding our failures were successes.
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken, we moderns are building houses for them.
To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of ignorance.
Our bravest and best lessons are not learned through success, but through misadventure.
Nor is a day lived, if the dawn is left out of it, with the prospects it opens.
Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon; of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll.
One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books, though preparation is necessary to profitable reading; and the less reading is better than more:—book-struck men are of all readers least wise, however knowing or learned.
Sympathy wanting, all is wanting.—Personal magnetism is the conductor of the sacred spark that puts us in human communion, and gives us to company, conversation, and ourselves.
Thought means life, since those who do not think do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
The travelled mind is the catholic mind, educated out of exclusiveness and egotism.
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