Top 92 Quotes & Sayings by Augustus William Hare

I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven.

Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot.

True modesty does not consist in an ignorance of our merits, but in a due estimate of them.

I could hardly feel much confidence in a man who had never been imposed upon.

If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer.

The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one.

How few are our real wants! and how easy is it to satisfy them! Our imaginary ones are boundless and insatiable.

Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody.

A faith that sets bounds to itself, that will believe so much and no more, that will trust thus far and no further, is none.

It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.

Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.

How deeply rooted must unbelief be in our hearts when we are surprised to find our prayers answered.

I suspect we have internal senses. The mind's eye since Shakespeare's time has been proverbial; and we have also a mind's ear. To say nothing of dreams, one certainly can listen to one's own thoughts, and hear them, or believe that one hears them: the strongest argument adducible in favour of our hearing any thing.

Every wise man lives in an observatory.

Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions.

How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands? Why! I am doing it myself at this very moment.

Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law.

The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth.

When will talkers refrain from evil speaking: when listeners refrain from evil-hearing.

We like slipping, but not falling; our real anxiety is to be tempted enough.

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish.

I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.

Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in.

People cannot go wrong, if you don't let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them.

Seeking is not always the way to find.

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.

To know the hight [sic] of a mountain, one must climb it.

A person should go out on the water on a fine day to a small distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see Nature really smile. Never does she look so delightful, as when the sun is brightly reflected by the water, while the waves are gently rippling, and the prospect receives life and animation from the glancing transit of an occasional row-boat, and the quieter motion of a few small vessels. But the land must be well in sight; not only for its own sake, but because the immensity and awfulness of a mere sea-view would ill accord with the other parts of the glittering and joyous scene.

When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not at once expose herself impudently to the public gaze; but for a time remains veiled in a transparent cloud, till she gradually acquires courage to endure the looks and admiration of beholders.

One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains; much trouble, by taking trouble.

The praises of others may be of use in teaching us, not what we are, but what we ought to be.

There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.

Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.

When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.

There is a glare about worldly success which is very apt to dazzle men's eyes.

The thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it.

They who disbelieve in virtue because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun because it is not always noon.

When a man says he sees nothing in a book, he very often means that he does not see himself in it: which, if it is not a comedy or a satire, is likely enough.

We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.

Excessive indulgence to others, especially to children is in fact only self-indulgence under an alias.

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

Much of this world's wisdom is still acquired by necromancy,--by consulting the oracular dead.

The cross was two pieces of dead wood; and a helpless, unresisting Man was nailed to it; yet it was mightier than the world, and triumphed, and will ever triumph over it.

The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing.

In the moment of our creation we receive the stamp of our individuality; and much of life is spent in rubbing off or defacing the impression.

They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold.

The difference between those whom the world esteems as good and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temptation.

In a mist the heights can for the most part see each other; but the valleys cannot.

A youth's love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous.

Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it.

The grand difficulty is to feel the reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due place in our thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind's eye and our heart's eye ever fixed on the land of promise, without looking away from the road along which we are to travel toward it.

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

There are men whom you will never dislodge from an opinion, except by taking possession of it yourself.

Many a man's vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild.

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.

Practical life teaches us that people may differ and that both may be wrong: it also teaches us that people may differ and both be right. Anchor yourself fast in the latter faith, or the former will sweep your heart away.

Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order.

How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.

Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it.