Karen Swallow Prior Quotes

#1. I mistook non-conformity for freedom and in so doing found myself anything but free. For it is in conformity to one's true nature that one is most becoming, in both senses of the word: well-fitted and beautiful.

Karen Swallow Prior

#2. the more I see of the 'honoured, famed, and great,' the more I see of the littleness, the unsatisfactoriness of all created good; and that no earthly pleasure can fill up the wants of the immortal principle within."20 Now the truth of this was even more apparent.

Karen Swallow Prior

#3. I am so afraid that strangers with think me good! and there is a degree of hypocrisy in appearing much better than one is. - Hannah More

Karen Swallow Prior

#4. Her shift in thinking was clearly conflicted. It must have been difficult to disavow something for which she had a deep love and in which she had been immersed so much of her life.

Karen Swallow Prior

#5. I struggled against God. Not as many do. But still I did, in my own way. I didn't doubt his being. I doubted his ways. I doubted that his ways were better than my ways.

Karen Swallow Prior

#6. The more I see of the 'hounoured, famed, and great,' the more I see of the littleness, the unsatisfactoriness of all created good; and that no earthly pleasure can fill up the wants of the immortal principle within.

Karen Swallow Prior

#7. God can carry on his own work, though all such poor tools as I were broken.

Karen Swallow Prior

#8. What good literature can do and does do - far greater than any importation of morality - is touch the human soul.

Karen Swallow Prior

#9. ... evangelicals were instrumental in advancing the ideal of companionate marriage, one built on shared faith and mutual affection, a revolutionary notion in an era in which forced marriages were a not-so-distant memory.

Karen Swallow Prior

#10. Furthermore, even these limited accomplishments should be obtained, Barbauld cautioned, "in a quiet and unobserved manner" for the display of knowledge by a woman is "punished with disgrace."6 Besides, the Monthly Review complained in a 1763 review, "intense thought spoils a lady's features."7

Karen Swallow Prior

#11. If the right book can save your soul, then perhaps the wrong ones can damn it.

Karen Swallow Prior

#12. Books have formed the soul of me. I know that spiritual formation is of God, but I also know - mainly because I learned it from books - that there are other kinds of formation, too, everyday gifts, and that God uses the things of this earth to teach us and shape us, and to help us find truth

Karen Swallow Prior

#13. ... mischief, ... arises not from our living in the world, but from the world living in us; occupying our hearts, and monopolizing our affections.

Karen Swallow Prior

#14. It should be held as an eternal truth, that what is morally wrong can never be politically right.65

Karen Swallow Prior

#15. Rather than majoring in frivolities, women should be educated in useful subjects and 'be furnished with a stock of ideas, and principles, and qualifications, and habits, ready to be applied and appropriated ... ' - Hannah More

Karen Swallow Prior