Katharine Fullerton Gerould Quotes

46 Sourced Quotes

Culture' means a long receptivity to things of the mind and the spirit.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
I have always, privately and humbly, thought it a pity that so good a word [as culture] should go out of the best vocabularies; for when you lose an abstract term, you are apt to lose the thing it stands for.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
On the whole, I should say that the person who likes to lie should never, in any circumstances, be allowed to. Leave the lying to the people who hate it. You will not find them indulging often.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Some of the men and women who will not say in so many words the thing which is not, will deliberately give a false impression. They are not the servants of truth; they are the parasites of truth.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The wilderness is a good place to cry in; the echoes are magnificent.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The geologic ages are dealt with by pick and hammer and reduced to slides and the lore of the stars has become a pure matter of mathematical formulae.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
There are some who, believing that all is for the best in the best of possible worlds, and that to-morrow is necessarily better than to-day, may think that if culture is a good thing we shall infallibly be found to have more of it that we had a generation since; and that if we can be shown not to have more of it, it can be shown not to be worth seeking.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Each man's private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess...

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Do you see any majority, anywhere, in this imperfect and irreligious world, admitting that the minority is precious? That any minority is precious?

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The imagination can be happy in places where the whole man is not.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
You can be slum-born and slum-bred and still achieve something worth while; but it is a stupid inverted snobbishness to be proud of it. If one had a right to be proud of anything, it would be of a continued decent tradition back of one.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
No fashion has ever been created expressly for the lean purse or for the fat woman: the dressmaker's ideal is the thin millionaires.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The indiscreet questioner - and by indiscreet questions I mean questions which it is not conceivably a man's duty either to the community or to any individual to answer - is a marauder, and there is every excuse for treating him as such.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The great danger of the scientific obsession is not the destruction of all things that are not science, but the slow infection of those things.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
When the temperamental and unconventional people are not mere plagiarists of dead eccentrics, they lack, in almost every case, thehistoric sense.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
If we have a dollar to spend on some wild excess, we shall spend it on a book, not on asparagus out of season.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
If you are perfectly willing to shock an individual verbally, the next thing you will be doing is to shock him practically.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The very notion of tabu is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old tabu than none, for a man cannot be said to be"on the side of the stars" at all, unless he makes refusals.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The insidiousness of science lies in its claim to be not a subject, but a method. You could ignore a subject; no subject is all-inclusive. But a method can plausibly be applied to anything within the field of consciousness.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Every one knows about the young man who falls in love with the chorus-girl because she can kick his hat off, and his sister's friends can't or won't. But the youth who marries her, expecting that all her departures from convention will be as agile or as delightful to him as that, is still the classic example of folly.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
If a person is to be unconventional, he must be amusing or he is intolerable: for, in the nature of the case, he guarantees you nothing but amusement. He does not guarantee you any of the little amenities by which society has assured itself that, if it must go to sleep, it will at least sleep in a comfortable chair.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Most men have always wanted as much as they could get; and possession has always blunted the fine edge of their altruism.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The great mistake of the reformers is to believe that life begins and ends with health, and that happiness begins and ends with a full stomach and the power to enjoy physical pleasures, even of the finer kind.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Conventional manners are a kind of literacy test for the alien who comes among us.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
The past is discredited because it is not modern. Not to be modern is the great sin. So, perhaps, it is. But every one has, in his day, been modern. And surely even modernity is a poor thing beside immortality. Since we must all die, is it not perhaps better to be a dead lion than a living dog?

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould
Nothing makes people so worthy of compliments as occasionally receiving them. One is more delightful for being told one is delightful — just as one is more angry for being told one is angry.

Katharine Fullerton Gerould