80 Quotes by Anna Jameson

When we talk of leaving our childhood behind us, we might as well say that the river flowing onward to the sea had left the fountain behind.

Where the vivacity of the intellect and the strength of the passions exceed the development of the moral faculties the character is likely to be embittered or corrupted by extremes, either of adversity or prosperity.

The moment in which the spirit meets death is perhaps like the moment in which it is embraced in sleep. I suppose it never happened to any one to be conscious of the immediate transition from the waking to the sleeping state.

To some characters, fame is like an intoxicating cup placed to the lips,--they do well to turn away from it who fear it will turn their heads. But to others fame is "love disguised," the love that answers to love in its widest, most exalted sense.

In our relations with the people around us, we forgive them more readily for what they do, which they can help, than for what they are, which they cannot help.

Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.

As the eye becomes blinded by fashion to positive deformity, so, through social conventionalism, the conscience becomes blinded to positive immorality.

It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man--the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse--the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

As the rolling stone gathers no moss, so the roving heart gathers no affections.