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Life Without and Life Within Quotes by Margaret Fuller: Context & Meanings

2 quotations linked to Life Without and Life Within by or associated with Margaret Fuller, with source notes, explanations and related topics.

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Posthumous collection of essays, reviews and poems

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Self-reliance, inward worth, literature, art, social criticism, dignity and the development of the individual mind.

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“For the soul seeks not adorers, but peers.”

Margaret Fuller

Meaning & context

Respectful relationship is distinguished from worship or dependency: a developed person seeks equals capable of intelligent sympathy rather than admirers who surrender judgment.

Source details

Life Without and Life Within, Part I ‘Reviews,’ essay ‘Menzel's View of Gœthe,’ Project Gutenberg #39037. ‘For the soul seeks not adorers, but peers’ appears in Fuller's discussion of the youth of genius, mockers and worshippers, immediately contrasting blind worship with ‘intelligent sympathy.’ It remains nineteenth-century literary criticism and intellectual reflection rather than a universal social or relationship rule.

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“There is reason and reality in some degree of self-reliance.”

Margaret Fuller

Meaning & context

Self-reliance becomes credible when it grows from tested knowledge of what one can actually endure and do, rather than from empty confidence or social display.

Source details

Life Without and Life Within, “The Poor Man”; Fuller argues that difficult experience can produce realistic knowledge of one’s resources and a grounded degree of self-reliance.

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Posthumous collection of essays, reviews and poems

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