Frances E. Willard Quotes

The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.

Temperance is moderation in the things that are good and total abstinence from the things that are foul.

I finally concluded that all failure was from a wobbling will rather than a wobbling wheel.

We must choose. Be a child of the past with all its crudities and imperfections, its failures and defeats, or a child of the future, the future of symmetry and ultimate success.

She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.

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?

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.

God is action - let us be like God.

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.

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.

In externals we advance with lightening express speed, in modes of thought and sympathy we lumber on in stage-coach fashion.

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.

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.

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.