Top 92 Quotes & Sayings by Augustus William Hare - Page 2

Some persons take reproof good-humoredly enough, unless you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince and writhe, and start up and knock you down for your impertinence, or wish you good morning.

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

In science its main worth is temporary, as a stepping-stone to something beyond. Even [Newton's] Principia ... is truly but the beginning of a natural philosophy. Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.

Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil.

When a watch goes ill, it is not enough to move the hands; you must set the regulator. When a man does ill, it is not enough to alter his handiwork, you must regulate his heart.

Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too, at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him.

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.

Science sees signs; Poetry, the thing signified. Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.

Do, and have done. The former is far the easiest.

Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?

Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue; and, as is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them than through any other part of the fence.

A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.

It is said that Windham, when he came to the end of a speech, often found himself so perplexed by his own subtlety that he hardly knew which way he was going to give his vote. This is a good illustration of the fallaciousness of reasoning, and of the uncertainties which attend its practical application.

Few minds are sunlike, sources of light in themselves and to others: many more are moons that shine with a borrowed radiance. One may easily distinguish the two: the former are always full; the latter only now and then, when their suns are shining full upon them.

Mythology is not religion. It may rather be regarded as the ancient substitute, the poetical counterpart, for dogmatic theology.

Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.

Temporary madness may be necessary in some cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of illness is to carry off the humours of the body.

What a type of happy family is the family of the Sun! With what order, with what harmony, with what blessed peace, do his children the planets move around him, shining with light which they drink in from their parent's in at once upon him and on one another!

Few are aware that they want any thing, except pounds schillings and pence.

Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.

When will talkers refrain from evil speaking? When listeners refrain from evil hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impressions against persons whom they don't know, from a person whom they do know--an authority good for nothing.

What do our clergy lose by reading their sermons? They lose preaching, the preaching of the voice in many cases, the preaching of the eye almost always.

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

The body too has its rights; and it will have them: they cannot be trampled on without peril. The body ought to be the soul's best friend. Many good men however have neglected to make it such: so it has become a fiend and has plagued them.

Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,--one pure, the other impure.

Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance; and yet God in his wisdom has made them a part of oaks. And in so doing he has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without.

Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.

Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live.

Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.

Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs.

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.

The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it.