Leslie Stephen Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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.

Leslie Stephen
The doctrine of toleration requires a positive as well as a negative statement. It is not only wrong to burn a man on account of his creed, but it is right to encourage the open avowal and defence of every opinion sincerely maintained. Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

Leslie Stephen
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.

Leslie Stephen
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.

Leslie Stephen
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.

Leslie Stephen
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?

Leslie Stephen
The only way in which one human being can properly attempt to influence another is by encouraging him to think for himself, instead of endeavoring to instill ready-made opinions into his head.

Leslie Stephen
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.

Leslie Stephen
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.

Leslie Stephen
He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.

Leslie Stephen
I believe that the ascent of mountains forms an essential chapter in the complete duty of man, and that it is wrong to leave any district without setting foot on its highest peak.

Leslie Stephen
God is angry with man. Unless we believe and repent we shall all be damned. It is impossible, indeed, for its advocates even to say this without instantly contradicting themselves. Their doctrine frightens them. They explain in various ways that a great many people will be saved without believing, and that eternal damnation is not eternal nor damnation.

Leslie Stephen
The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.

Leslie Stephen
When I ceased to accept the teaching of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs, as of discovering that I had never really believed.

Leslie Stephen