Ellen Glasgow Quotes - Page 3

Given two tempers and the time, the ordinary marriage produces anarchy.

Though it sounds absurd, it is true to say I felt younger at sixty than I felt at twenty.

. . . every tree near our house had a name of its own and a special identity. This was the beginning of my love for natural things, for earth and sky, for roads and fields and woods, for trees and grass and flowers; a love which has been second only to my sense of enduring kinship with birds and animals, and all inarticulate creatures.

Cruelty is the only sin.

There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.

There is no state of satisfaction, because to himself no man is a success.

In her single person she managed to produce the effect of a majority.

The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.

After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances.

Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion

Women like to sit down with trouble - as if it were knitting.

anger and jealousy are spasms of the nerves, not of the heart.

No idea is so antiquitated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not some day be antiquitated . . . to seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.

Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.

In her abhorrrence of a vacuum, Nature, for the furtherance of her favorite hobby, has often to resort to strange devices. If she could but understand that vacuity is sometimes better than superfluity!

What depresses me is the inevitable way the second rate forges ahead and the deserving is left behind.

To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.

When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?

Conscience represents a fetich to which good people sacrifice their own happiness, bad people their neighbors'.

The government's like a mule, it's slow and it's sure; it's slow to turn, and it's sure to turn the way you don't want it.

I revolted from sentimentality, less because it was false than because it was cruel.

... though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.

a successful politician does not have convictions; he has emotions.

True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.

You look as if you had lived on duty and it hadn't agreed with you.