Anna Jameson Mind Quotations

What we truly and earnestly aspire to be, that in some sense we are. The mere aspiration, by changing the frame of mind, for the moment realizes itself.

If a superior woman marry a vulgar or inferior man, he makes her miserable, but seldom governs her mind or vulgarizes her nature; and if there be love on his side, the chances are that in the end she will elevate and refine him.

Reputation being essentially contemporaneous, is always at the mercy of the Envious and the Ignorant. But Fame, whose very birth is posthumous, and which is only known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds, can neither be increased nor diminished by any degree of wilfulness.

It is not poverty so much as pretence that harasses a ruined man--the struggle between a proud mind and an empty purse--the keeping up a hollow show that must soon come to an end. Have the courage to appear poor, and you disarm poverty of its sharpest sting.

A cunning mind emphatically delights in its own cunning, and is the ready prey of cunning.

All my own experience of life teaches me the contempt of cunning, not the fear. The phrase "profound cunning," has always seemed to me a contradiction in terms. I never knew a cunning mind which was not either shallow, or on some point diseased.

He that seeks popularity in art closes the door on his own genius: as he must needs paint for other minds, and not for his own.

Fame is that which is known to exist by the echo of its footsteps through congenial minds.