A. W. Hare Quotes

In oratory the will must predominate.

Be what you are. This is the first step toward becoming better than you are.

Psychopaths are social predators, and like all predators, they are looking for feeding grounds. Wherever you get power, prestige and money, you will find them.

The mind is like a sheet of white paper in this, that the impressions it receives the oftenest, and retains the longest, are black ones.

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.

Sudden resolutions, like the sudden rise of mercury in a barometer, indicate little else than the variability of the weather.

The puritan through life's sweet garden goes to pluck the thorn and cast away the rose.

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere.

A psychopath can tell what you're thinking but what they don't do is feel what you feel. These are people without a conscience.

Poetry is the key to the hieroglyphics of nature.

Not all psychopaths are in prison - some are in the boardroom.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

The percentage of mistakes in quick decisions is no greater than in long-drawn-out vacillations, and the effect of decisiveness itself makes things go and creates confidence.

Seeking is not always the way to find.

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

Smiles are the language of love.

When dogs and humans make eye contact, that actually releases what's known as the love hormone, oxytocin, in both the dog and the human.

Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome.

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.

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

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.

The intellect of the wise is like glass; it admits the light of heaven and reflects it.

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.

When you get older, then you feel death not at the end of the road, but death all around you, in everything. Life is saturated with death. I feel death everywhere.

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

Weak minds sink under prosperity as well as adversity; but strong and deep ones have two high tides.

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

Today the real test of power is not capacity to make war but capacity to prevent it.

Children always turn towards the light. Oh that grown-up people in this world became like little children!

Thought is the wind and knowledge the sail.

No one but a fool is always right.

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.

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

Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it.

Nothing good bursts forth all at once. The lightning may dart out of a black cloud; but the day sends his bright heralds before him, to prepare the world for his coming.

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

The women of the United States are nothing but brood sows, having sons to be put into the army and made into fertilizer.

The next best thing to a very good joke is a very bad 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.

The power of faith will often shine forth the most when the character is naturally weak.

You cant get a contemporary story about what is going on inside government, and how society sees itself, on American TV.

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

The most important playwright's gift is to hit your time and speak to your time.

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.

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.

Few persons have courage enough to appear as good as they really are.

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.

The great mystery of adaptation is that true fidelity can only be achieved through lavish promiscuity.