Margaret Fuller Quotes

We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.

May I never be complete. May I never be content. May I never be perfect.

There is no such thing as perfection, there are only standards. And after you have set a standard you learn that it was not high enough. You want to surpass it.

I think when you begin to think of yourself as having achieved something, then there's nothing left for you to work towards. I want to believe that there is a mountain so high that I will spend my entire life striving to reach the top of it.

It is reasonable to have perfection in our eye that we may always advance toward it, though we know it can never be reached.

Make the wise man within you your living ideal.

Your soul's desires compel you to grow, evolve and move closer to your highest potential.

We will not find the inner strength to evolve to a higher level if we do not inwardly develop this profound feeling that there is something higher than ourselves.

Whatever a man imagines he can attain, if he doesn't become too arrogant and encroach on the rights of the gods.

One should assiduously pursue perfection without ever claiming to attain it.

Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our faith gives us knowledge of something better: that we can become oak trees.

Heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility.

I hold it truth, with him who sings To one clear harp in divers tones, That men may rise on stepping-stones Of their dead selves to higher things.

Humble in a humble state and great in greatness, I will work out the divinity that is busy within my mind.

No man who acts from a sense of duty ever puts the lesser duty above the greater. No man has the desire and the ability to work onhigh things, but he has also the ability to build himself a high staging.

Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. What provides the motive, the energy for discipline? This force I believe to be love. I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

If we pretend to have reached either perfection or satisfaction, we have degraded ourselves and our work. God's work only may express that, but ours may never have that sentence written upon it, Behold it was very good.

He who would be a great soul in the future, must be a great soul now.

A spirit cannot soar with only one wing.

It is part of the unceasing human endeavor to prove that the spirit of man can transcend the flaws of his own nature.

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

A life without problems would be a barren existence, without the opportunity for spiritual growth.

Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.

Your brilliance comes from your spirit. To deny it is arrogance. To accept it is humility.

The true secret of spiritual strength is self-distrust and deep humilty.