Anna Brownell Jameson Quotes

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All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Childhood does sometimes pay a second visit to man—youth never.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords — philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Anna Brownell Jameson
A man may be as much a fool from the want of sensibility as the want of sense.

Anna Brownell Jameson
We can sometimes love what we do not understand, but it is impossible completely to understand what we do not love.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Accuracy of language is one of the bulwarks of truth.

Anna Brownell Jameson
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 realizes itself.

Anna Brownell Jameson
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.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Nature and truth are one, and immutable, and inseparable as beauty and love.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Blessed is the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted from the world. Yet more blessed and more dear the memory of those who have kept themselves unspotted in the world.

Anna Brownell Jameson
The distinction between talent and genius is definite. Talent combines and uses; genius combines and creates.

Anna Brownell Jameson
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.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Social opinion is like a sharp knife. There are foolish people who regard it only with terror, and dare not touch or meddle with it. There are more foolish people, who, in rashness or defiance, seize it by the blade, and get cut and mangled for their pains. And there are wise people, who grasp it discreetly and boldly by the handle, and use it to carve out their own purposes.

Anna Brownell Jameson
A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

Anna Brownell Jameson
If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man, he makes her miserable, but seldom governs her mind or vulgarizes her nature; and if there be love on his side, the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.

Anna Brownell Jameson
He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.

Anna Brownell Jameson
There are brains so large that they unconsciously swamp all individualities ties which come in contact or too near, and brains so small that they cannot take in the conception of any other individuality as a whole, only in part or parts.

Anna Brownell Jameson
I have much more confidence in the charity which begins in the home and diverges into a large humanity, than in the world-wide philanthropy which begins at the outside of our horizon to converge into egotism.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Extreme vanity sometimes hides under the garb of ultra modesty.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Never yet were the feelings and instincts of our nature violated with impunity; never yet was the voice of conscience silenced without retribution.

Anna Brownell Jameson
A Canadian settler hates a tree, regards it as his natural enemy, as something to be destroyed, eradicated, annihilated by all and any means.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Lavater told Goethe that on a certain occasion when he held the velvet bag in the church as collector of the offerings, he tried to observe only the hands; and he satisfied himself that in every individual the shape of the hand and of the fingers, the action and sentiment in dropping the gift into the bag, were distinctly different and individually characteristic.

Anna Brownell Jameson
All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase "profound cunning," has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased.

Anna Brownell Jameson
As what we call genius arises out of the disproportionate power and size of a certain faculty, so the great difficulty lies in harmonizing with it the rest of the character.

Anna Brownell Jameson
A cunning mind emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning.

Anna Brownell Jameson
A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.

Anna Brownell Jameson
Conflict, which rouses up the best and highest powers in some characters, in others not only jars the whole being, but paralyzes the faculties.

Anna Brownell Jameson
I have no other hope of happiness than in being with you, dearest!

Anna Brownell Jameson
There are no such self-deceivers as those who think they reason when they only feel.

Anna Brownell Jameson
I have neither religion enough, nor philosophy enough, nor youth enough, nor life enough, to exist through faith in the absent and the distant and the invisible; and when I take up the pen to write to you, I am so painfully struck by the hopelessness of our separation in this world, that I could almost throw it down again with an 'à quoi bon?'

Anna Brownell Jameson