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Leslie Stephen Quotes
1832–1904 England
Sir Leslie Stephen KCB (28 November 1832 – 22 February 1904) was an English writer on philosophy and literary history. He was also one of the leading British mountaineers of his generation, the first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, Thackeray's son-in-law and Virginia Woolf's father.
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The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.
Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.
He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.
If you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable now-a-days, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study.
Sketches from Cambridge (1865)
Is there not a teaching of nature very apt to suggest horror and despair rather than a complacent brooding over soothing thoughts?
Genius is a capacity for taking trouble.
A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance.
Samuel Johnson (1878)
Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.
We can no longer be content with refuting our opponents; we are also bound to explain them. The vitality of any doctrine supposed to be erroneous proves that it cannot be entirely erroneous.
The Science of Ethics (1882)
Philistine – a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species.
The fool who does not know his own folly may be doing nothing, and the philosopher who is trying to darken knowledge may be doing worse than nothing; but every sincere attempt to grapple with real difficulties made by a man not utterly incompetent has its value.
The Science of Ethics (1882)
Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?
If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.
The poet should touch our heart by showing his own
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