Hugh MacLennan Quotes & Sayings

In comparison with a loving human being, everything else is worthless. — Hugh MacLennan

Love, sought as an escape from the burden of the self, turns rapidly into a captivity. — Hugh MacLennan

Timothy's eyes followed the straight back, the high shoulders, and the crisp white hair out of the door and out of his life -- a man, so he was to write years later, the like of whom he was never to met again, "because he was the only man I ever knew who could use words like honour, duty, and responsibility without making me feel like throwing up." — Hugh MacLennan

In the Thirties all of us who were young had been united by anger and the obviousness of our plight; in the war we had been united by fear and the obviousness of the danger. But now, prosperous under the bomb, we all seemed to have become atomized. Wherever I looked I saw people trying to live private lives for themselves and their families. Nobody asked the big questions any more. Why think, when the thing to be thought about is so huge it is impossible to think about it? Why ask where you are going, when you know you can't stop even if you wish? Why ask why, when it does no good to know why? — Hugh MacLennan

The Greeks, who knew everything, understood that without the orgy there is no middle ground between bedlam and Toronto ... we need the healing grace of the orgy in this country. — Hugh MacLennan

It was as though the whole world was thrown back six or seven hundred years without having the organizations those ancient peoples had." He paused, breathing heavily. "Of course, there were many survivors who understood small skills. Some of them would repair small engines, but they couldn't manufacture them. They couldn't refine fuels. Fortunately a good many doctors who had practiced in small towns and in the country survived. They had their medical books, but they could no longer get the drugs they needed. Anyway, medicine survived after a fashion. Then gradually little patterns of order began to appear and another Bureaucracy came into being. — Hugh MacLennan

Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a toolmaking animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But, in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal. — Hugh MacLennan

Now, Dr. Anderson, you've been telling us how the world began and how brilliant it was of all the scientists to be able to find it out." He paused and deployed his most innocent smile. "But of course there were no scientists around when the world began." Another pause, "Now I have a question with which Science -- I hope I'm not getting out of my league -- may be more humanly involved." Another pause. "How do you think the worldwill end? — Hugh MacLennan

Death suddenly seemed unimportant and life seemed everything — Hugh MacLennan

People talk of calf-love with wistful disdain, but mine was as intense as any emotion I knew until I crossed the frontier, years later, when I discovered that all loving is a loving of life in the midst of death. — Hugh MacLennan

This campus was an island of quiet in the city's roar, and at night it was an island of dark in the city's blaze. — Hugh MacLennan

But that night as I drove back to Montreal, I at least discovered this: that there is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and that the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them. — Hugh MacLennan

The clouds crossed the sky, country rains washed the gardens, moons shone on the lake and the hillsides, cicadas sang in the August grass, boys and girls fell in love. In the early October of that year, in the cathedral hush of a Quebec Indian summer with the lake drawing into its mirror the fire of the maples, it came to me that to be able to love the mystery surrounding us is the final and only sanction of human existence. What else is left but that, in the end? All our lives we had wanted to belong to something larger than ourselves. We belonged consciously to nothing now except to the pattern of our lives and fates. To God, possibly. I am chary of using that much-misused word, but I say honestly that at least I was conscious of His power. Whatever the spirit might be I did not know, but I knew it was there. Life was a gift; I knew that now. And so, much more consciously, did she. — Hugh MacLennan

Marx is only half right when he calls religion the opium of the people. It may turn a lot of people into sheep, but it turns far too many of them into tigers. — Hugh MacLennan

Happiness annihilates time. — Hugh MacLennan

Wise Penelope! That's was Odysseus said to his wife when he got home. I don't think he ever told her he loved her. He probably knew the words would sound too small. — Hugh MacLennan

The farmer's way of saving money: to be owed by someone he trusted. — Hugh MacLennan

....we have discovered a great social secret in Canada. We have contrived to solve problems which would ruin other countries merely by ignoring their existence. — Hugh MacLennan

The Socialists can scheme their schemes and the Liberals can dream their dreams, but we, at least, have work to do. — Hugh MacLennan

He sat down again. He wanted her body, even though there were plenty of other bodies he could have. Which meant, I suppose, that he wanted her body to want his. It would have been beneath his intellectual dignity to admit that he also wanted her soul to like his own soul. — Hugh MacLennan