Augustus William Hare Quotes & Sayings

Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it. — Augustus William Hare

When a watch goes ill, it is not enough to move the hands; you must set the regulator. When a man does ill, it is not enough to alter his handiwork, you must regulate his heart. — Augustus William Hare

The grand difficulty is to feel the reality of both worlds, so as to give each its due place in our thoughts and feelings, to keep our mind's eye and our heart's eye ever fixed on the land of promise, without looking away from the road along which we are to travel toward it. — Augustus William Hare

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope. — Augustus William Hare

The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook: his tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutritive thoughts; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, and yet so that they may have a relish. — Augustus William Hare

The thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occupations, where the mind has leisure to must during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh and wakeful breezes blowing round it ... — Augustus William Hare

In the moment of our creation we receive the stamp of our individuality; and much of life is spent in rubbing off or defacing the impression. — Augustus William Hare

Do, and have done. The former is far the easiest. — Augustus William Hare

Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing. — Augustus William Hare

What do our clergy lose by reading their sermons? They lose preaching, the preaching of the voice in many cases, the preaching of the eye almost always. — Augustus William Hare

Excessive indulgence to others, especially to children is in fact only self-indulgence under an alias. — Augustus William Hare

Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one? — Augustus William Hare

Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in. — Augustus William Hare

There is a glare about worldly success which is very apt to dazzle men's eyes. — Augustus William Hare

A person should go out on the water on a fine day to a small distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see Nature really smile. Never does she look so delightful, as when the sun is brightly reflected by the water, while the waves are gently rippling, and the prospect receives life and animation from the glancing transit of an occasional row-boat, and the quieter motion of a few small vessels. But the land must be well in sight; not only for its own sake, but because the immensity and awfulness of a mere sea-view would ill accord with the other parts of the glittering and joyous scene. — Augustus William Hare

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit. — Augustus William Hare

The cross was two pieces of dead wood; and a helpless, unresisting Man was nailed to it; yet it was mightier than the world, and triumphed, and will ever triumph over it. — Augustus William Hare

What a type of happy family is the family of the Sun! With what order, with what harmony, with what blessed peace, do his children the planets move around him, shining with light which they drink in from their parent's in at once upon him and on one another! — Augustus William Hare

It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence. — Augustus William Hare

Few are aware that they want any thing, except pounds schillings and pence. — Augustus William Hare

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more? — Augustus William Hare

I could hardly feel much confidence in a man who had never been imposed upon. — Augustus William Hare

Some persons take reproof good-humoredly enough, unless you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince and writhe, and start up and knock you down for your impertinence, or wish you good morning. — Augustus William Hare

How few are our real wants! and how easy is it to satisfy them! Our imaginary ones are boundless and insatiable. — Augustus William Hare

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets. — Augustus William Hare

Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love. — Augustus William Hare

We like slipping, but not falling; our real anxiety is to be tempted enough. — Augustus William Hare

A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely. — Augustus William Hare

They who disbelieve in virtue because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun because it is not always noon. — Augustus William Hare

The difference between those whom the world esteems as good and those whom it condemns as bad, is in many cases little else than that the former have been better sheltered from temptation. — Augustus William Hare

Many a man's vices have at first been nothing worse than good qualities run wild. — Augustus William Hare

A faith that sets bounds to itself, that will believe so much and no more, that will trust thus far and no further, is none. — Augustus William Hare

They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold. — Augustus William Hare

Life may be defined to be the power of self-augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture; for then a steam-engine over a coal-pit might be made to live. — Augustus William Hare

Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat. — Augustus William Hare

I was surprised just now at seeing a cobweb around a knocker; for it was not on the door of heaven. — Augustus William Hare

Science sees signs; Poetry, the thing signified.
Co-author with his brother Julius Hare. — Augustus William Hare

There are men whom you will never dislodge from an opinion, except by taking possession of it yourself. — Augustus William Hare

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else. — Augustus William Hare

True modesty does not consist in an ignorance of our merits, but in a due estimate of them. — Augustus William Hare

When we skim along the surface of history we see little but the rough barren rocks that rise out of it. — Augustus William Hare

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week. — Augustus William Hare

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses. — Augustus William Hare

Every wise man lives in an observatory. — Augustus William Hare

I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless. — Augustus William Hare

To know the hight [sic] of a mountain, one must climb it. — Augustus William Hare

Seeking is not always the way to find. — Augustus William Hare

Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs. — Augustus William Hare

Some minds are made of blotting-paper: you can write nothing on them distinctly. They swallow the ink, and you find a large spot. — Augustus William Hare

Few minds are sunlike, sources of light in themselves and to others: many more are moons that shine with a borrowed radiance. One may easily distinguish the two: the former are always full; the latter only now and then, when their suns are shining full upon them. — Augustus William Hare

Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable; they even dance; and yet God in his wisdom has made them a part of oaks. And in so doing he has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within because we see the lightsomeness without. — Augustus William Hare

Some men so dislike the dust kicked up by the generation they belong to, that, being unable to pass, they lag behind it. — Augustus William Hare

The effects of human wickedness are written on the page of history in characters of blood: but the impression soon fades away; so more blood must be shed to renew it. — Augustus William Hare

The body too has its rights; and it will have them: they cannot be trampled on without peril. The body ought to be the soul's best friend. Many good men however have neglected to make it such: so it has become a fiend and has plagued them. — Augustus William Hare

The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing; if ill-packed, next to nothing. — Augustus William Hare

The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one. — Augustus William Hare

If you wish a general to be beaten, send him a ream full of instructions; if you wish him to succeed, give him a destination, and bid him conquer. — Augustus William Hare

One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains; much trouble, by taking trouble. — Augustus William Hare

Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism. — Augustus William Hare

How deeply rooted must unbelief be in our hearts when we are surprised to find our prayers answered. — Augustus William Hare

Temporary madness may be necessary in some cases, to cleanse and renovate the mind; just as a fit of illness is to carry off the humours of the body. — Augustus William Hare

Mythology is not religion. It may rather be regarded as the ancient substitute, the poetical counterpart, for dogmatic theology. — Augustus William Hare

How idle it is to call certain things God-sends! as if there was anything else in the world. — Augustus William Hare

When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the garments of her widowhood, she does not at once expose herself impudently to the public gaze; but for a time remains veiled in a transparent cloud, till she gradually acquires courage to endure the looks and admiration of beholders. — Augustus William Hare

It is said that Windham, when he came to the end of a speech, often found himself so perplexed by his own subtlety that he hardly knew which way he was going to give his vote. This is a good illustration of the fallaciousness of reasoning, and of the uncertainties which attend its practical application. — Augustus William Hare

A youth's love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous. — Augustus William Hare

In a mist the heights can for the most part see each other; but the valleys cannot. — Augustus William Hare

The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth. — Augustus William Hare

Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof. — Augustus William Hare

The praises of others may be of use in teaching us, not what we are, but what we ought to be. — Augustus William Hare

Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody. — Augustus William Hare

Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,
one pure, the other impure. — Augustus William Hare

We look to our last sickness for repentance, unmindful that it is during a recovery men repent, not during a sickness. — Augustus William Hare

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election. — Augustus William Hare

Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too, at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him. — Augustus William Hare

How often one sees people looking far and wide for what they are holding in their hands? Why! I am doing it myself at this very moment. — Augustus William Hare

Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue; and, as is the case with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them than through any other part of the fence. — Augustus William Hare

Practical life teaches us that people may differ and that both may be wrong: it also teaches us that people may differ and both be right. Anchor yourself fast in the latter faith, or the former will sweep your heart away. — Augustus William Hare

Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order. — Augustus William Hare

Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil. — Augustus William Hare

Nature is mighty. Art is mighty. Artifice is weak. For nature is the work of a mightier power than man. Art is the work of man under the guidance and inspiration of a mightier power. Artifice is the work of mere man, in the imbecility of his mimic understanding. — Augustus William Hare

When will talkers refrain from evil speaking? When listeners refrain from evil hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impressions against persons whom they don't know, from a person whom they do know
an authority good for nothing. — Augustus William Hare

When a man says he sees nothing in a book, he very often means that he does not see himself in it: which, if it is not a comedy or a satire, is likely enough. — Augustus William Hare

I suspect we have internal senses. The mind's eye since Shakespeare's time has been proverbial; and we have also a mind's ear. To say nothing of dreams, one certainly can listen to one's own thoughts, and hear them, or believe that one hears them: the strongest argument adducible in favour of our hearing any thing. — Augustus William Hare

Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law ... — Augustus William Hare

Much of this world's wisdom is still acquired by necromancy,
by consulting the oracular dead. — Augustus William Hare

Is bread the better for kneading? so is the heart. Knead it then by spiritual exercises; or God must knead it by afflictions. — Augustus William Hare

People cannot go wrong, if you don't let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them. — Augustus William Hare