Walter Bagehot Quotes

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

If you have to prove you are worthy of credit, your credit is already gone.

The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.

Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.

A democratic despotism is like a theocracy: it assumes its own correctness.

All people are most credulous when they are most happy.

We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

The real essence of work is concentrated energy.

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.

Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to drink other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.

The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Life is a school of probability.

Stupidity is nature's favorite resource for preserving consistency of opinion.

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

Adventure is the life of commerce, but caution is the life of banking.

Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.

No real English gentleman, in his secret soul, was ever sorry for the death of a political economist.