Author

Anne Bradstreet

English-American · 1612-1672 · 10 quotes

10

Quotes

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Anne Bradstreet

English-American · 1612–1672

10 quotes in our collection

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) was an English-born Puritan poet in colonial Massachusetts and the first published poet of British North America. Her major work, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, appeared in London in 1650, and later poems circulated in manuscript and posthumous editions. Anne Bradstreet matters because she gave early American literature a learned, intimate, and distinctly female voice. Her poetry moves between public meditation and private feeling: faith, illness, marriage, motherhood, loss, authority, and divine providence all appear in her work. Poems such as To My Dear and Loving Husband and Contemplations remain central to American literary history. Bradstreet wrote within Puritan theology while also revealing personal wit, grief, and intellectual ambition. Her quotes endure because they make adversity, love, wisdom, and spiritual trial feel immediate and human.

Common Themes

love3 marriage3 lifetime2 religion2 adversity2

wisdom1

happiness1

age1

Collected Quotes

All quotes by Anne Bradstreet

Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish

If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee

Sweet words are like honey, a little may refresh, but too much gluts the stomach

My love is such that Rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee give recompetence.

Source: To My Dear and Loving Husband (1678)

Then while we live, in love let's so persever That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Source: To My Dear and Loving Husband (1678)

A prosperous state makes a secure Christian, but adversity makes him consider.

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending

Iron till it be thoroughly heated is incapable to be wrought; so God sees good to cast some men into the furnace of affliction, and then beats them on his anvil into what frame he pleases

If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome

There is no object that we see, no action that we do, no good that we enjoy, no evil that we feel of fear, but we may make some spiritual advantage of all