Norman Douglas Quotes

Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty.

To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him...two.

A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother.

A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.

He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity - a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire.

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Nobody can misunderstand a boy like his own mother. Mothers at present can bring children into the world, but this performance is apt to mark the end of their capacities. They can't even attend to the elementary animal requirements of their offspring. It is quite surprising how many children survive in spite of their mothers.

Has any man ever obtained inner harmony by simply reading about the experiences of others? Not since the world began has it ever happened. Each man must go through the fire himself.

Learn to foster an ardent imagination; so shall you descry beauty which others passed unheeded.

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

Why always "not yet"? Do flowers in spring say "not yet"?

Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.

It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.

There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook.

Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.

You can construct the character of a man and his age not only from what he does and says, but from what he fails to say and do.

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

The pine stays green in winter... wisdom in hardship.

The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day.

One can always trust to time. Insert a wedge of time and nearly everything straightens itself out.

How often could things be remedied by a word. How often is it left unspoken.

The business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is a mockery.

The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn.

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying.

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never.

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.

Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.

They who are all things to their neighbors cease to be anything to themselves.

People who have reformed themselves has contributed their full share towards the reformation of their neighbor.

Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating.

I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.

No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble.

There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.

I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.

The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit.

Justice is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest.

The families of our friends are always a disappointment.

No great man is ever born too soon or too late.

It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half-rude.

The secret of happiness is curiosity

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.