Georges Duhamel Quotes

40 Sourced Quotes

Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it.

Georges Duhamel
We do not know the true value of our moments until they have undergone the test of memory.

Georges Duhamel
M. André Mayer … made an astonishing confidence not long ago. The laboratories, he said, are working at this moment with splendid results. In physics and biology, for example, we can predict new and very important discoveries. What is humanity going to do with the power which will soon be put into its hands? Humanity is not yet ready to receive this power. It is not in a state to make good use of it. The events of the moment prove that this power, of which we know very little yet, and which is announced to us with such proper reserve, has little chance of serving the cause of man straight away. It will more probably be employed, or rather confiscated, for the benefit of the ambitious, the impudent, and the reckless.

Georges Duhamel
Use your radio, but know how to distrust it—and do not let a day go by without reading and meditation if you want to save your soul, that soul which is yours and yours alone.

Georges Duhamel
The swimmer adrift on the open seas measures his strength, and strives with all his muscles to keep himself afloat. But what is he to do when there is no land on the horizon, and none beyond it?

Georges Duhamel
The instinct to synthesize is a good one so long as it is concerned with elements that are capable of forming a whole. But today the man in the street is fed, morally as well as physically, on a mass of debris which has no resemblance to a nourishing diet. There is no method in this madness, which is the very negation of culture.

Georges Duhamel
It is strange what a contempt men have for the joys that are offered them freely.

Georges Duhamel
If humanity were to lose its libraries, not only would it be deprived of certain treasures of art, certain spiritual riches, but, more important still, it would lose its recipes for living.

Georges Duhamel
It is an extraordinary thing that this civilization, which wears out our nerves and exacts an almost painful effort from us in all our doings, should be at great pains to spare the mass of people that intellectual effort which is the only measure of true culture.

Georges Duhamel
Civilization: if it is not in man's heart—well, then, it is nowhere.

Georges Duhamel
But lately, Death was the cruel stranger, the stealthy-footed visitor.... Now, it is the romping dog of the house.

Georges Duhamel
In books may be found the recipes for manufacture of a steam-engine alongside the recipes for daily living—the prescriptions for the mind and the heart.

Georges Duhamel
Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself.

Georges Duhamel
Just as we say listening and hearing, looking and seeing, so we ought to have two expressions to distinguish active reading from passive.

Georges Duhamel
The man who has entered into a beautiful union is sure of at least one person to whom he can give the best that he possesses.

Georges Duhamel
A book exhales a subtle odor of spirituality throughout the place it adorns.

Georges Duhamel
… a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries, … a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence,… which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a 'star' in Los Angeles.

Georges Duhamel
In these days, when nothing retains its former semblance, all these men are no longer those you so lately knew. Suffering has roused them from the sleep of gentle life, and every day fills them with a terrible intoxication. They are now something more than themselves; those we loved were merely happy shadows.

Georges Duhamel
Let us lose none of their humble words, let us note their slightest gestures, and tell me, tell me that we will think of them together, now and later, when we realise the misery of the times and the magnitude of their sacrifice.

Georges Duhamel
One of my friends whom I hold in high esteem admitted to me the other day that when he wants to work nowadays … he has to turn on his radio. The droning of the loudspeaker—so he says—puts him in a favorable frame of mind and ideas pour out. I cannot help but thinking that this is not the act of a true musician. For thought has a rhythm of its own, which must either clash with the rhythm from outside and lose energy, or else submit to the outer impulse in restless slavery.

Georges Duhamel
In the beds which the piety of the public has prepared on every side, stricken men await the verdict of fate.

Georges Duhamel
Culture is at once the expression and the reward of an effort, and any system of civilization which tends to relax effort will suffer a corresponding depreciation of culture.

Georges Duhamel
We can know nothing till after this grave debate. The soul must withdraw, for this is not its hour. Now the knife must divide the flesh, and lay the ravage bare, and do its work completely.

Georges Duhamel
Aristocracy of the mind … is the only true aristocracy in my opinion. It is the essence, the very life of a well-built society.

Georges Duhamel
The grief he had suppressed for months overflowed, or rather, rushed out in desperate, heartrending lamentations.

Georges Duhamel
I hold that the novelist is the historian of the present, just as the historian is the novelist of the past.

Georges Duhamel
If the public gets out of the habit of reading they will not come back to it. We shall enter a new phase of our history from which there is no turning back.

Georges Duhamel
For many people in the future, radio will take the place of an inner life.

Georges Duhamel
Radio and cinema are daily playing a more and more important part, not only in the amusements of the twentieth-century man but also in the visible formation of his character.

Georges Duhamel
Death remains a great thing, but one with which one's relations have become frequent and intimate. Like the king who shows himself at his toilet, Death is still powerful, but it has become familiar and slightly degraded.

Georges Duhamel