Amos Bronson Alcott
Amos Bronson Alcott
Amos Bronson Alcottwas an American teacher, writer, philosopher, and reformer. As an educator, Alcott pioneered new ways of interacting with young students, focusing on a conversational style, and avoided traditional punishment. He hoped to perfect the human spirit and, to that end, advocated a vegan diet before the term was coined. He was also an abolitionist and an advocate for women's rights...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth29 November 1799
CountryUnited States of America
One's life should be sufficiently interesting to furnish entertainment in the record.
Love is the key to felicity, nor is there a heaven to any who love not. We enter Paradise through its gates only.
Man is a living lie--a bitter jest Upon himself--a conscious grain of sand Lost in a desert of unconsciousness.
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.
The mind is fast emancipating itself from the dominion of man and of matter. It has let loose fearful forces on the world.
Modesty, that perennial flower planted instinctively in the human breast, blooms therein only as continence guards and virtue keeps.
Pity the mother who assumes the name without being all this implies!
A chaste generation would restore Paradise.
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.
An author who sets his reader on sounding the depths of his own thoughts serves him best.
Children are illuminated text-books, breviaries of doctrine, living bodies of divinity, open always and inviting their elders to peruse the characters inscribed on the lovely leaves.
A state, a community, caring first for all its children, providing amply for their spiritual as for their temporal well-being, has organized the primitive Eden.
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.
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.