Augustus William Hare Quotes
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The praises of others may be of use in teaching us, not what we are, but what we ought to be.
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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.
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Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.
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Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.
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Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.
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I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven.
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Mythology is not religion. It may rather be regarded as the ancient substitute, the poetical counterpart, for dogmatic theology.
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Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs.
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It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.
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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.
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In science its main worth is temporary, as a stepping-stone to something beyond. Even [Newton's] Principia ... is truly but the beginning of a natural philosophy. Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.
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Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.
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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.
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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.
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Every wise man lives in an observatory.
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Seeking is not always the way to find.
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Many a man's vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild.
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They who disbelieve in virtue because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun because it is not always noon.
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A youth's love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous.
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How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world.
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There are men whom you will never dislodge from an opinion, except by taking possession of it yourself.
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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.
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Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,--one pure, the other impure.
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Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil.
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Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot.
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Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.
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Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live.
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Much of this world's wisdom is still acquired by necromancy,--by consulting the oracular dead.
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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.
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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.
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