11 quotes
The public mind [is] a cloudy region where only the simplest shapes are discerned with any accuracy.
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)
Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but success transmutes them into virtues.
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)
Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)
Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and that no one is alive.
Skye High (1937)
Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived.
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)
Hamlet is every man's self-love with all its dreams realized. He wears all the crowns and carries every cross.
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)
What, still alive at twenty-two,
A clean upstanding chap like you?
Sure, if your throat ’tis hard to slit,
Slit your girl’s, and swing for it.
The reward of renunciation is some good greater than the thing renounced. To renounce with no vision of such a good, from fear or in automatic obedience to a formula, is to weaken the springs of life, and to diminish the soul's resistance to this world.
Matthew Arnold (1928)
Like enough, you won't be glad,
When they come to hang you, lad:
But bacon's not the only thing
That's cured by hanging from a string.
Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)
There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit; but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order.
The Progress of a Biographer (1949)