32 quotes
English writer (1866–1946)
“This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.”
"There is no liberty, save wisdom and self-control. Liberty is within--not without. It is each man's own affair."
on Freedom
"New and stirring things are belittled because if they are not belittled the humiliating question arises 'Why then are you not taking part in them?"
on Innovation
"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."
on Education
"There's truths you have to grow into."
on Truth
"You've made a beast of yourself,- to the beasts you may go."
on Character
"Civilization is a race between disaster and education."
"When Man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear. But not before."
on Philosophy
"If you are in difficulties with a book, try the element of surprise: attack it at an hour when it isn't expecting it."
on Writing
"Our true nationality is mankind."
"We are kept keen on the grindstone of pain and necessity."
on Life
"It is when suffering finds a voice andsets our nerves quivering that this pity comes troubling us."
on Empathy
"Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change."
on Nature
"I never yet heard of a useless thing that was not ground out ofexistence by evolution sooner or later. Did you? And pain gets needless."
"Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo."
"What a huge inaccessible lumber-room of thought and experience we amounted to, I thought; how much we are, how little we transmit."
on Communication
"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."
on History
"...and spend my days surrounded by wise books, - bright windows in this life of ours, lit by the shining souls of men."
on Literature
"The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature."
"It's chance, I tell you,' he interrupted, ' as everything is in a man's life."
"The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it."
