Norman Douglas Quotes - Page 2

It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.

Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it.

Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating.

Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.

No great man is ever born too soon or too late.

One can always trust to time. Insert a wedge of time and nearly everything straightens itself out.

How often could things be remedied by a word. How often is it left unspoken.

No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble.

There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.

There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook.

I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.

They who are all things to their neighbors cease to be anything to themselves.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Justice is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest.

The families of our friends are always a disappointment.

The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit.

It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half-rude.

He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity - a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.

Nobody can misunderstand a boy like his own mother. Mothers at present can bring children into the world, but this performance is apt to mark the end of their capacities. They can't even attend to the elementary animal requirements of their offspring. It is quite surprising how many children survive in spite of their mothers.

People who have reformed themselves has contributed their full share towards the reformation of their neighbor.