Augustus William Hare Quotes

75 Sourced Quotes

Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in.

Augustus William Hare
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.

Augustus William Hare
Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.

Augustus William Hare
The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth.

Augustus William Hare
Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

Augustus William Hare
Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding.

Augustus William Hare
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.

Augustus William Hare
Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions.

Augustus William Hare
Few minds are sunlike, sources of light in themselves and to others: many more are moons that shine with a borrowed radiance. One may easily distinguish the two: the former are always full; the latter only now and then, when their suns are shining full upon them.

Augustus William Hare
They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold.

Augustus William Hare
Science sees signs; Poetry the thing signified.

Augustus William Hare
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.

Augustus William Hare
We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness.

Augustus William Hare
How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands? Why! I am doing it myself at this very moment.

Augustus William Hare
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.

Augustus William Hare
The grand difficulty is to feel the reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due place in our thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind's eye and our heart's eye ever fixed on the land of promise, without looking away from the road along which we are to travel toward it.

Augustus William Hare
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.

Augustus William Hare
Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance; and yet God in his wisdom has made them a part of oaks. And in so doing he has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without.

Augustus William Hare
When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it.

Augustus William Hare
A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.

Augustus William Hare
It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.

Augustus William Hare
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.

Augustus William Hare
Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too, at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him.

Augustus William Hare
Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order.

Augustus William Hare
The thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it...

Augustus William Hare
The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

Augustus William Hare
Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.

Augustus William Hare
The body too has its rights; and it will have them: they cannot be trampled on without peril. The body ought to be the soul's best friend. Many good men however have neglected to make it such: so it has become a fiend and has plagued them.

Augustus William Hare
Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs.

Augustus William Hare
How deeply rooted must unbelief be in our hearts when we are surprised to find our prayers answered.

Augustus William Hare