Philip Gilbert Hamerton Quotes

30 Sourced Quotes

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
They [clouds] come to the dullest and dreariest of scenes like the splendid cortege of an Oriental sovereign who traverses some miserable village.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
The opinions of men who think are always growing and changing, like living children.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
The men of science are like the coral insects in the sea; they build on the work of their predecessors and rise ever higher and higher...

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
You may have a cat in the room with you without anxiety about anything except eatables. The presence of a cat is positively soothing to a student.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Few of us have been so exceptionally unfortunate as not to find, in our own age, some experienced friend who has helped us by precious counsel, never to be forgotten. We cannot render it in kind, but perhaps in the fulness of time it may become our noblest duty to aid another as we have ourselves been aided, and to transmit to him an invaluable treasure, the tradition of the intellectual life.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Conversation is interesting in proportion to the originality of the central ideas which serve as pivots and the fitness of the little facts and observations which are contributed by the talkers.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
It is always a mistake to push analogies too far...

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is, by these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class, and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be had within a traversable distance, they sit and work alone.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Society is, and must be, based upon appearances, and not upon the deepest appearances, and not realities.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
I wonder how it is that so cheerful-looking a tree as the willow should ever have become associated with ideas of sadness.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Some have iron thews and sinews, some are muscular of mind; Learned savans, skilful blacksmiths, each are noble in their kind. But to give the savan's wisdom to the hammer and the shears, Come those intermediate workers, — England's civil engineers.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
The land appertains to its lord, but the landscape belongs to him who, for the time being enjoys it.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton
The whole subject of landscape is a world of illusions, the only thing about it that is certainly not an illusion belong the effect upon the mind of each particular human being who fancies that he sees something, and knows that he feels something, when he stands in the presence of Nature.

Philip Gilbert Hamerton