Augustus William Hare Quotes - Page 2

There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.

There is a glare about worldly success which is very apt to dazzle men's eyes.

There are men whom you will never dislodge from an opinion, except by taking possession of it yourself.

Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot.

Many a man's vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild.

I could hardly feel much confidence in a man who had never been imposed upon.

When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.

They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold.

A faith that sets bounds to itself, that will believe so much and no more, that will trust thus far and no further, is none.

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish.

Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it.

I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven.

They who disbelieve in virtue because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun because it is not always noon.

Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.

When a man says he sees nothing in a book, he very often means that he does not see himself in it: which, if it is not a comedy or a satire, is likely enough.

Excessive indulgence to others, especially to children is in fact only self-indulgence under an alias.

I suspect we have internal senses. The mind's eye since Shakespeare's time has been proverbial; and we have also a mind's ear. To say nothing of dreams, one certainly can listen to one's own thoughts, and hear them, or believe that one hears them: the strongest argument adducible in favour of our hearing any thing.

Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,--one pure, the other impure.

Few minds are sunlike, sources of light in themselves and to others: many more are moons that shine with a borrowed radiance. One may easily distinguish the two: the former are always full; the latter only now and then, when their suns are shining full upon them.

Do, and have done. The former is far the easiest.

Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too, at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him.

The body too has its rights; and it will have them: they cannot be trampled on without peril. The body ought to be the soul's best friend. Many good men however have neglected to make it such: so it has become a fiend and has plagued them.

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

The grand difficulty is to feel the reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due place in our thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind's eye and our heart's eye ever fixed on the land of promise, without looking away from the road along which we are to travel toward it.