American philosopher, feminist & educator (1836-1911)
Look carefully through all the claims pressing upon you in your complicated life, and decide once and for all what it is that is the one really important and overmastering duty in it, and should be the one dominating aim. Then remember that if you succeed in that, the others, so multifarious, are really no more than the fringe of the garment, and that you need not spend so much anxiety over them, provided that the one most important is faithfully attended to.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
When you are waiting for a train, don't keep perpetually looking to see if it is coming. The time of its arrival is the business of the conductor, not yours. It will not come any sooner for all your nervous glances and your impatient pacing, and you will save strength if you will keep quiet. After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who "fuss" continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
The school should not bear all the blame, for without the cooperation of the home most of the best efforts are neutralized.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Relation of School and Home
We are always getting ready to live, and never having time enough to live.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
Time has reversed many of the old verdicts of history which once we thought fixed, our whole theory of natural science has been changed--all that seems to us now of little use. But the lessons of justice or of injustice which we saw every day, the image of the beautiful sternness of truth or the cringing and wavering falsehood which filled the atmosphere of the old school rooms--those we remember still.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Relation of School and Home
You have got to play the game with the cards that have been dealt to you, and it is of no use for you to bewail your fate because you don't hold different ones. Look them over, arrange them, and play. You certainly must play them before you will get any others, and you need never expect to have other people's cards.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
Teachers are learning that what they first, last and always are to keep steadily before their attention is the mind of the pupil, and the effects produced on that mind by the facts of reasoning presented, not the facts themselves.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Relation of School and Home
There are perhaps only one or two things in the world which are not far more charming in desire than they are in possession.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
But this, it seems to me, should be the grand leading principle of a mother in the education of her daughter, to give her such faith in herself, such knowledge of the laws of her own being, such trust in the guiding power of the universe, that she will have a principle of life and growth within her which will react upon all outward circumstances and turn them into means of education.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Education of American Girls
We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares. We increase our possessions only to the enlargement of our anxieties.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
What the child is and is becoming--that is the question today with the foremost teachers, not how much he knows.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Relation of School and Home
Do not seek for information of which you cannot make use.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
History in the making is a very uncertain thing.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
The proper function of any school is to train character, and all its studies are of importance only as means by which this end can be attained.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Relation of School and Home
Nor is woman to blame if the question of her education occupies so much attention. The demands made are not hers--the continual agitation is not primarily of her creating. It is simply the tendency of the age, of which it is only the index. It would be as much out of place to blame the weights of a clock for the moving of the hands, while, acted upon by an unseen, but constant force, they descend slowly but steadily towards the earth.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Education of American Girls
The more we reduce ourselves to machines in the lower things, the more force we shall set free to use in the higher.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unused power of whatever kind. This is the restlessness of the germ within the seed, struggling upward and downward towards its proper life.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Technique of Rest
Very few have arrived at the conclusion that woman's nature, like man's, is self-determining, and that her character and her powers must decide her destiny; that instead of prescribing the outward limits of her action, the important point is to increase her energy, to regulate her activity by self-discipline, to purify her nature by nobility of thought and sentiment, and then to leave her free to work out her thought into life as she can and must.
ANNA C. BRACKETT
The Education of American Girls