Literary Birthday – 17 May – Anna Brownell Jameson

12 Quotes

1. A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.
2. In morals, what begins in fear usually ends in wickedness; in religion, what begins in fear usually ends in fanaticism. Fear, either as a principle or a motive, is the beginning of all evil.
3. Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.
4. Genius and sunshine have this in common that they are the two most precious gifts of heaven to earth, and are dispensed equally to the just and the unjust.
5. There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.
6. All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, the safe and just side of a question is the generous and merciful side.
7. Childhood sometimes does pay a second visit to man, youth never.
8. As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonising with it the rest of the character.
9. Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords – philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.
10. The only competition worthy a wise man is with himself.
11. We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.
12. What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of the mind, for the moment realises itself.

Anna Brownell Jameson was a British author known for her travel memoirs. Her books include Shakespeare’s Heroines: Characteristics of Women: Moral, Poetical, and Historical, Sacred and Legendary Art, and her travel memoir Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada.

Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Anna_Brownell_Jameson.png

See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson

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