Frances E. Willard Quotations

The loves of women for each other grow more numerous each day, and I have pondered much why these things were. That so little should be said about them surprises me, for they are everywhere ... In these days when any capable and careful woman can honorably earn her own support, there is no village that has not its examples of two hearts in counsel, both of which are feminine.

Tens of thousands who could never afford to own, feed and stable a horse, had by this bright invention enjoyed the swiftness of motion which is perhaps the most fascinating feature of material life.

Every woman who vacates a place in the teachers' ranks and enters an unusual line of work, does two excellent things: she makes room for someone waiting for a place and helps to open a new vocation for herself and other women.

If I am asked to explain why I learned the bicycle I should say I did it as an act of grace, if not of actual religion.

God is action - let us be like God.

If women can organize missionary societies, temperance societies, and every kind of charitable organization... why not permit them to be ordained to preach the Gospel and administer the sacraments of the Church?

Wanted: More Praise I cannot help believing that the world will be a better and a happier place when people are praised more and blamed less; when we utter in their hearing the good we think and also gently intimate the criticisms we hope may be of service. For the world grows smaller every day. It will be but a family circle after a while.

Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.

This seems to be the law of progress in everything we do; it moves along a spiral rather than a perpendicular; we seem to be actually going out of the way, and yet it turns out that we were really moving upward all the time.

Please do not take counsel of women who are so prejudiced that, as I once heard said, they would not allow a male grasshopper to chirp on their lawn; but out of your own great heart, refuse to set an example to such folly.