Top 109 Quotes & Sayings by George Henry Lewes
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English philosopher George Henry Lewes.
Last updated on November 4, 2024.
Sincerity is moral truth.
When a man fails to see the truth of certain generally accepted views, there is no law compelling him to provoke animosity by announcing his dissent.
Good writers are of necessity rare.
The object of Literature is to instruct, to animate, or to amuse.
The only cure for grief is action.
Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.
Sincerity is not only effective and honourable, it is also much less difficult than is commonly supposed.
As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.
All great authors are seers.
Books have become our dearest companions, yielding exquisite delights and inspiring lofty aims.
Science is the systematic classification of experience.
Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.
Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength.
All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.
The public can only be really moved by what is genuine.
Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.
Endeavour to be faithful, and if there is any beauty in your thought, your style will be beautiful; if there is any real emotion to express, the expression will be moving.
Books minister to our knowledge, to our guidance, and to our delight, by their truth, their uprightness, and their art.
Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.
The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.
Personal experience is the basis of all real Literature.
We must never assume that which is incapable of proof.
Ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder, grow familiar with objects and learn nothing new about them.
Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.
No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so.
A man may be variously accomplished, and yet be a feeble poet.
Speak for yourself and from yourself, or be silent.
If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.
Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.
In all sincere speech there is power, not necessarily great power, but as much as the speaker is capable of.
All good Literature rests primarily on insight.
Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.
Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.
Insight is the first condition of Art.
Science is not addressed to poets.
The superiority of one mind over another depends on the rapidity with which experiences are thus organised.
Murder, like talent, seems occasionally to run in families.
The delusions of self-love cannot be prevented, but intellectual misconceptions as to the means of achieving success may be corrected.
It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.
In complex trains of thought signs are indispensable.
The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power.
Love is blind; couch not his eyes.
Individual experiences being limited and individual spontaneity feeble, we are strengthened and enriched by assimilating the experience of others.
To one man a stream is so much water-power, to another a rendezvous for lovers.
A cell is regarded as the true biological atom.
It is not enough that a man has clearness of vision, and reliance on sincerity, he must also have the art of expression, or he will remain obscure.
Whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crotchet-monger and an eccentric.
Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress. It deepens our natural sensibilities, and strengthens by exercise our intellectual capacities. It stores up the accumulated experience of the race, connecting Past and Present into a conscious unity; and with this store it feeds successive generations, to be fed in turn by them.
The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.
Every one who has seriously investigated a novel question, who has really interrogated Nature with a view to a distinct answer, will bear me out in saying that it requires intense and sustained effort of imagination.
The air is crowded with birds -- beautiful, tender, intelligent birds -- to whom life is a song.
Science as we now understand the word is of later birth. If its germinal origin may be traced to the early period when Observation, Induction, and Deduction were first employed, its birth must be referred to that comparatively recent period when the mind, rejecting the primitive tendency to seek in supernatural agencies for an explanation of all external phenomena, endeavoured, by a systematic investigation of the phenomena themselves to discover their invariable order and connection.
The great desire of this age is for a doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that conduct may really be the consequence of belief
Vehemence without feeling is but rant.
The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.
Character is built out of circumstances. From exactly the same materials, one man builds palaces, while another builds hovels.
In the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the earth we tread on, Life is every where. Nature lives: every pore is bursting with Life ; every death is only a new birth, every grave a cradle.
The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.
No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.
Bad acting, like bad writing, has a remarkable uniformity, whether seen on the French, German, or English stages; it all seems modeled after two or three types, and those the least like types of good acting. The fault generally lies less in the bad imitation of a good model, than in the successful imitation of a bad model.
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