Augustus William Hare Quotes

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.

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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!

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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