Arthur Balfour Quotes

35 Sourced Quotes

The General Strike has taught the working class more in four days than years of talking could have done.

Arthur Balfour
Nothing matters very much and very few things matter at all.

Arthur Balfour
It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth.

Arthur Balfour
I thought he was a young man of promise, but it appears he is a young man of promises.
Of Winston Churchill

Arthur Balfour
Biography should be written by an acute enemy.

Arthur Balfour
The interdependence of theory and practice cannot be ignored without inflicting injury on both; and he is but a poor friend to either who undervalues their mutual cooperation.

Arthur Balfour
The power of authority is never more subtle and effective than when it produces a psychological atmosphere or climate favorable to the life of certain modes of belief, unfavorable, and even fatal, to the life of others.

Arthur Balfour
Society, dead or alive, can have no charm without intimacy and no intimacy without an interest in trifles.

Arthur Balfour
Science depends upon measurement, and things not measurable are therefore excluded, or tend to be excluded, from its attention.

Arthur Balfour
Those who look forward to a period of continuous and, so to speak, inevitable progress, are bound to assign some more solid reason for their convictions than a merely empirical survey of the surface lessons of history.... Humanity, civilisation, progress itself, must have a tendency to mitigate the harsh methods by which Nature has wrought out the variety and the perfection of organic life.

Arthur Balfour
Everything that happened, good or bad, would subtract something from the lessening store of useful energy, till a time arrived when nothing could happen any more, and the universe, frozen into eternal repose, would for ever be as if it were not. /.../ The physical course of nature does not merely fail to indicate design, it seems loudly to proclaim its absence.

Arthur Balfour
On questions of taste there is notoriously the widest divergence of opinion./.../ if, from a survival point of view, one taste be as good as another, it is not the varieties in taste which should cause surprise so much as the uniformities. To be sure, the uniformities have often no deep aesthetic roots. They represent /.../ tendencies to agreement, which govern our social ritual, and thereby make social life possible.

Arthur Balfour
Theory of selection leaves untouched all that can be inferred from the existence of the conditions which make organic evolution possible: matter which lives, multiplies, and varies ; an environment which possesses the marvellously complex constitution required to make these processes possible. It cannot produce either the original environment or the original living matter. These must be due either to luck or to contrivance; and, if they be due to luck, the luck (we must own) is great. How great we cannot say.

Arthur Balfour
Unless appearances are to be trusted, why should we believe in Science? If Science is true, how can we trust to appearances?

Arthur Balfour
The energies of our system will decay; the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish.

Arthur Balfour
... there were some things that were true, and some things that were trite; but what was true was trite, and what was not trite was not true...

Arthur Balfour
I am more or less happy when being praised, not very uncomfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained.

Arthur Balfour
Whereas reasons may, and usually do, figure among the proximate causes of belief, and thus play a part in both kinds of series (cognitive and causal), it is always possible to trace back the causal series to a point where every trace of rationality vanishes ; where we are left face to face with conditions of beliefs social, physiological, and physical— which, considered in themselves, are quite a-logical in their character. /.../ on any merely naturalistic hypothesis, the rational elements in the causal series lie always on the surface. Penetrate but a short way down, and they are found no more.

Arthur Balfour
Man, so far as natural science by itself is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets.

Arthur Balfour
We now know too much about matter to be materialists. The very essence of the physical order of things is that it creates nothing new. Change is never more than a redistribution of that which never changes. But sensibility belongs to the world of consciousness, not to the world of matter.

Arthur Balfour
Reply to Frank Harris's remark that all the faults of his age came from Christianity and journalism:
Christianity, of course… but why journalism?

Arthur Balfour
Every human soul is of infinite value, eternal, free; no human being, therefore, is so placed as not to have within his reach, in himself and others, objects adequate to infinite endeavor.

Arthur Balfour
Apart from life and thought, there is no reason to regard one form of material distribution as in any respect superior to another. A solar system may be more interesting than its parent nebula ; it may be more beautiful. But if there be none to unravel its intricacies or admire its splendours, in what respect is it better? Its constituent atoms are more definitely grouped, the groups move in assignable orbits ; but why should the process by which these results have been achieved be regarded as other than one of purposeless change super-induced upon meaningless uniformity?

Arthur Balfour
Logic always seems to be telling us, in language quite unnecessarily technical, what we understood much better before it was explained.

Arthur Balfour
On being told that Lord Curzon, who was financially dependent on his wife Grace, would be disappointed not to be Prime Minister:
He may have lost the hope of glory, but he still retains the means of Grace.

Arthur Balfour