George Henry Lewes Quotes

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.

No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.

The only cure for grief is action.

Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.

The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.

Individual experiences being limited and individual spontaneity feeble, we are strengthened and enriched by assimilating the experience of others.

The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.

Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength.

If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.

Character is built out of circumstances. From exactly the same materials, one man builds palaces, while another builds hovels.

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

Science is not addressed to poets.

Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.

The air is crowded with birds -- beautiful, tender, intelligent birds -- to whom life is a song.

Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.

Good writers are of necessity rare.

The magic of the pen lies in the concentration of your thoughts upon one object.

All good Literature rests primarily on insight.

Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.

Science as we now understand the word is of later birth. If its germinal origin may be traced to the early period when Observation, Induction, and Deduction were first employed, its birth must be referred to that comparatively recent period when the mind, rejecting the primitive tendency to seek in supernatural agencies for an explanation of all external phenomena, endeavoured, by a systematic investigation of the phenomena themselves to discover their invariable order and connection.

Books minister to our knowledge, to our guidance, and to our delight, by their truth, their uprightness, and their art.

The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.

All great authors are seers.

Whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crotchet-monger and an eccentric.