Margaret Fuller Quotes on Knowledge
Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), the central woman of the New England Transcendentalist circle and editor of The Dial (1840–42), gave American letters its first major philosophical treatise on women's intellectual self-cultivation in Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). The framework presses the Emersonian doctrine of self-culture in a feminist direction: genuine knowledge for women, as for men, is the product of an active engagement with the materials of culture undertaken on the agent's own behalf, and the institutional and customary obstacles to that engagement constitute the principal injury inflicted on the female intellect.
Quotes
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Attributed to Margaret Fuller:
“If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.”
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“Genius will live and thrive without training, but it does not the less reward the watering pot.”
Life of Sir James Mackintosh" in Papers on Literature and Art (1846), p. 50 -
Attributed to Margaret Fuller:
“Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
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“There are noble books but one wants the breath of life sometimes. And I see no divine person. I myself am more divine than any I see — I think that is enough to say about them...”
Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson (1 March 1838); published in The Letters of Margaret Fuller vol. I, p. 327, , edited by Robert N. Hudspeth (1983) -
“Men disappoint me so, I disappoint myself so, yet courage, patience, shuffle the cards ...”
Letter to Reverend William Henry Channing (21 February 1841) quoted in Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1898) by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, p. 112 -
“It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods.”
Notes from Cambridge, Massachusetts (July 1842) published in Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (1852), Vol. II, p. 64