Amos Bronson Alcott Quotes

Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary.

Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.

The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence.

The less of routine, the more of life.

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.

Civilization degrades the many to exalt the few.

One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.

All unrest is but the struggle of the soul to reassure herself of her inborn immortality.

Success is sweeter and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.

Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind and finds the readiest responses.

Our bravest and best lessons are not learned through success, but through misadventure..

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant. —AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT.

Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression

Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength not by my weakness.

The less routine the more life.

An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.

Who knows the mind has the key to all things else.

Prudence is the footprint of Wisdom.

Success is sweet: the sweeter if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles and defeats.

Ideas first and last: yet it is not till these are formulated and utilized that the devotees of the common sense discern their value and advantages. The idealist is the capitalist on whose resources multitudes are maintained life long. Ideas in the head set hands about their several tasks, thus carrying forward all human endeavors to their issues.

Man must have some recognized stake in society and affairs to knit him lovingly to his kind, or he is wont to revenge himself for wrongs real or imagined.

Of books in our time the variety is so voluminous, and they follow so fast from the press, that one must be a swift reader to acquaint himself even with their titles, and wise to discern what are worth reading.

Добрата книга дава плодове, раждайки други книги; нейната слава се носи от век на век, а прочитането й представлява цяла ера в живота на читателите.

The passions refuse to be organized on a basis of their own; hostile to personal freedom and one another, they rush precipitately into anarchy and mob rule.

Concord is a classic land. The names of Emerson and Thoreau and Channing and Hawthorne are associated with the fields and forests and lakes and rivers of this township.

Consider how few persons you shall meet who are as sweet & sane as nature is. One quaffs health, courage, genius, and sanctity from that cup, and is never satiated with it.

I am an idea without hands.

When a man’s own culture falls behind that of his time, he is conservative. When it outstrips and enables him to over-see his time, he is a reformer.

In the ardor of his enthusiasm, a youth set forth in quest of a man of whom he might take counsel as to his future, but after long search and many disappointments, he came near relinquishing the pursuit as hopeless, when suddenly it occurred to him that one must first be a man to find a man, and profiting by this suggestion, he set himself to the work of becoming himself the man he had been seeking so long and fruitlessly.

Education is that process by which thought is opened out of the soul, and, associated with outward . . . things, is reflected back upon itself, and thus made conscious of its reality and shape. It is Self-Realization. As a means, therefore, of educating the soul out of itself, and mirroring forth its ideas, the external world offers the materials. This is the dim glass in which the senses are first called to display the soul, until, aided by the keener state of imagination . . . it separates those outward types of itself from their sensual connection, in its own bright mirror recognizes again itself, as a distinctive object in space and time, but out of it in existence, and painting itself upon these, as emblems of its inner and super-sensual life which no outward thing can fully portray. . . . A language is to be instituted between [the child’s] spirit and the surrounding scene of things in which he dwells. . . . He who is seeking to know himself, should be ever seeking himself in external things, and by so doing will he be best able to find, and explore his inmost light.

The history of books shows the humblest origin of some of the most valued, wrought as these were out of obscure materials by persons whose names thereafter became illustrious. The thumbed volumes, now so precious to thousands, were compiled from personal experiences and owe their interest to touches of inspiration of which the writer was less author than amanuensis, himself the voiced word of life for all times.

Who loves a garden, still his Eden keeps, Perennial pleasures plants, and wholesome harvests reaps.

Cults” of the time included groups like the Oneida Community, a camp of polyamorous communists in upstate New York (sounds fun); the Harmony Society, an egalitarian fellowship of science lovers in Indiana (how lovely); and (my favorite) a short-lived vegan farming cult in Massachusetts called Fruitlands, which was founded by philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott, an abolitionist, women’s rights activist, and father of Little Women author Louisa May Alcott.

Amos Bronson Alcott was another author of Concord, a sweet philosopher whom I shall ever remember with deepest gratitude as the only person who in my early youth ever imagined any literary capacity in me (and in that he was sadly mistaken, for he fancied I would be a poet). I have read very faithfully all his printed writings, trying to believe him a great man, a seer; but I cannot, in spite of my gratitude for his flattering though unfulfilled prophecy, discover in his books any profound signs of depth or novelty of thought. In his Tablets are some very pleasant, if not surprisingly wise, essays on domestic subjects; one, on "Sweet Herbs," tells cheerfully of the womanly care of the herb garden, but shows that, when written—about 1850—borders of herbs were growing infrequent.

Undeserved praise causes more pangs of conscience later than undeserved blame, but probably only for this reason, that our power of judgment are more completely exposed by being over praised than by being unjustly underestimated. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant. 
Amos Bronson Alcott, "Table Talk".