Augustus William Hare Quotes

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.

Seeking is not always the way to find.

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

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.

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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