Arthur Quiller-Couch Quotes & Sayings

We make our discoveries through our mistakes: we watch one another's success: and where there is freedom to experiment there is hope to improve. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

If you crave for Knowledge, the banquet of Knowledge grows and groans on the board until the finer appetite sickens. If, still putting all your trust in Knowledge, you try to dodge the difficulty by specialising, you produce a brain bulging out inordinately on one side, on the other cut flat down and mostly paralytic at that: and in short so long as I hold that the Creator has an idea of a man, so long shall I be sure that no uneven specialist realises it. The real tragedy of the Library at Alexandria was not that the incendiaries burned immensely, but that they had neither the leisure nor the taste to discriminate ... but we may agree that, in reading, it is not quantity so much that tells, as quality and thoroughness of digestion. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

You can see the meaning of the statement that "Literature is a living art" most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes - say Pure Mathematics and Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

Just go on reading, as well as you can, and be sure that when the children get the thrill of the story, for which you wait, they will be asking more questions, and pertinent ones, than you are able to answer. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

Trust in good verse then:
They only shall aspire,
When pyramids, as men
Are lost i'the funeral fire. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

If your language is confused, your intellect, if not your whole character, will almost certainly correspond. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

As we
dwell here between two mysteries, of a soul within and an ordered
Universe without, so among us are granted to dwell certain men of more
delicate intellectual fibre than their fellows
men whose minds have, as
it were, filaments to intercept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to us
stray messages between these two mysteries — Arthur Quiller-Couch

I am mistaken if a single epigram included fails to preserve at least some faint thrill of the emotion through which it had to pass before the Muse's lips let it fall, with however exquisite deliberation. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

His way was like other people's; he mounted no high horse; he was just
a man and a citizen. He indulged in no Socratic irony. But his
discourse was full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away neither
disgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill-tempered censure, but on
the contrary lifted out of themselves by charity, and encouraged to
more orderly, contented, hopeful lives. — Arthur Quiller-Couch

O pastoral heart of England! like a psalm Of green days telling with a quiet beat. — Arthur Quiller-Couch