Quotes by Amos Alcott

• Success is sweet and sweeter if long delayed and gotten through many struggles and defeats.
• Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.
• One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well.
• Our dreams drench us in senses, and senses steps us again in dreams.
• Our friends interpret the world and ourselves to us, if we take them tenderly and truly.
• Our ideals are our better selves.
• First find the man in yourself if you will inspire manliness in others.
• Strengthen me by sympathizing with my strength, not my weakness.
• That is a good book which is opened with expectation, and closed with delight and profit.
• The less routine the more life.
• Thought means life, since those who do not think so do not live in any high or real sense. Thinking makes the man.
• To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
• To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.
• We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.
• Where there is a mother in the home, matters go well.
• While one finds company in himself and his pursuits, he cannot feel old, no matter what his years may be.
• Who knows, the mind has the key to all things besides.
• Who speaks to the instincts speaks to the deepest in mankind, and finds the readiest response.
• Our notion of the perfect society embraces the family as its center and ornament, and this paradise is not secure until children appear to animate and complete the picture.
• A true teacher defends his students against his own personal influences.
• A government, for protecting business only, is but a carcass, and soon falls by its own corruption and decay.
• The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-distrust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciple.