Augustus William Hare Quotes - Page 3

In a mist the heights can for the most part see each other; but the valleys cannot.

Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.

The difference between those whom the world esteems as good and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temptation.

Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions.

Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it.

The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth.

It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.

We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.

Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law.

Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order.

Every wise man lives in an observatory.

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.

Much of this world's wisdom is still acquired by necromancy,--by consulting the oracular dead.

The thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it.

When will talkers refrain from evil speaking: when listeners refrain from evil-hearing.

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.

The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.

When will talkers refrain from evil speaking? When listeners refrain from evil hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impressions against persons whom they don't know, from a person whom they do know--an authority good for nothing.

Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.

Temporary madness may be necessary in some cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of illness is to carry off the humours of the body.

In science its main worth is temporary, as a stepping-stone to something beyond. Even [Newton's] Principia ... is truly but the beginning of a natural philosophy. Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.