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.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Categorized in : Men Mind Struggle

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

ubuntu evil peace

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

mind sides men

All government, all exercise of power, no matter in what form, which is not based in love and directed by knowledge, is a tyranny.

Anna Brownell Jameson

government matter exercise

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

Anna Brownell Jameson

inseparable beauty-and-love nature

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

cutting pain wise

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

ninety-nine generosity world

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

horizon humanity home

To reason from analogy is often dangerous, but to illustrate by a fanciful analogy is sometimes a means by which we light an idea, as it were, into the understanding of another.

Anna Brownell Jameson

light mean ideas

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

phrases mind profound

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of mind, for the moment realizes itself.

Anna Brownell Jameson

mind dream inspirational

Have the courage to appear poor and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

Anna Brownell Jameson

poverty poor

Occupation was one of the pleasures of paradise, and we cannot be happy without it.

Anna Brownell Jameson

paradise occupation work

As the presence of those we love is as a double life, so absence, in its anxious longing and sense of vacancy, is as a foretaste of death.

Anna Brownell Jameson

farewell love-is goodbye

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

greatness artist kings

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

punishment voice feelings

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

Anna Brownell Jameson

self reason thinking

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.

Anna Brownell Jameson

adversity passion character

A bond is necessary to complete our being, only we must be careful that the bond does not become bondage.

Anna Brownell Jameson

be-careful bondage doe

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.

Anna Brownell Jameson

ignorant echoes mind

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.

Anna Brownell Jameson

sunshine heaven two