Success is sweet: the sweeter if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles and defeats.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
That is a good book which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
The books that charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards; we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any deserving our equal affections.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Genius has oftenest been the pariah of his time, the unhoused god whom none cared for, unnamed till they whom he first promoted, enriched and honored, found it honorable to own their benefactor.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
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.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Time ripens the substance of a life as the seasons mellow and perfect its fruits. The best apples fall latest and keep longest.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
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.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
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.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
One cannot celebrate books sufficiently. After saying his best, still something better remains to be spoken in their praise. As with friends, one finds new beauties at every interview, and would stay long in the presence of those choice companions. As with friends, he may dispense with a wide acquaintance. Few and choice. The richest minds need not large libraries.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
An age deficient in idealism has ever been one of immorality and superficial attainment, since without the sense of ideas, nobility of character becomes of rare attainment, if possible.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Who knows the mind has the key to all things else.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
The finer literature, indeed, is characterized by a certain suffusion of the feminine flavor, the finer, the more ideal, thought plumed with sentiment; even science loves to spring from its feet, philosophy affect the clouds to inspire and edify.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
A government for protecting the coarser interests of the body, business and bread only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption to decay.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Hold fast, therefore, O circular philosopher, to thy centre, and drive the globe along its orbit by the momentum of thy thought.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
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.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Science has grown frightfully audacious in these days -- swift-footed, ponderous, careering over her iron ways with unslacking pace. This rampant dragon, on which I am mounted, see how he bends his once stiff neck to his rider, champing his checked bit and pawing the dust, impatient to leap around the globe. Genius is prescient, foresees its own might. Man is striving through these iron-ribbed, steam-sped hippogriffs, to recover his lost ubiquity and omnipotence, and threatens soon to grasp in his ample palm, and fix with flaming eye-ball, the elemental forces!
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
As education becomes inclusive, introspective, cosmic, promoting whole populations to power and privilege, it enthrones a vast, invisible, personal rule over the common mind.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Cities with all their advantages have something hostile to liberal learning, the seductions are so subtle and accost the senses so openly on all sides.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
Ourselves are cosmic and capacious beyond conjecture, and to experience some notion of the planetary perspective is the richest income from travelling. It takes all to inform and educate all. Sallies forth from our cramped firesides into other homes, other hearts, are wonderfully wholesome and enlarging. Travel opens prospects on all sides, widens our horizon, liberates the mind from geographical and conventional limitations, from local prejudices and national, showing the globe in its differing climates, zones, and latitudes of intelligence.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
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.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
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.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
If the ancients left us ideas, to our credit be it spoken that we moderns are building houses for them -- structures which neither Plato nor Archimedes had dreamed possible.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
The mind is fast emancipating itself from the dominion of man and of matter. It has let loose fearful forces on the world.
AMOS BRONSON ALCOTT, Table Talk
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