John Robert Seeley Quotes & Sayings

A grain of real knowledge, of genuine controllable conviction, will outweigh a bushel of adroitness; and to produce persuasion there is one golden principle of rhetoric not put down in the books-to understand what you are talking about. — John Robert Seeley

We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. — John Robert Seeley

History is the school of statesmanship. — John Robert Seeley

He who studies it [Nature] has continually the exquisite pleasure of discerning or half discerning and divining laws; regularities glimmer through an appearance of confusion, analogies between phenomena of a different order suggest themselves and set the imagination in motion; the mind is haunted with the sense of a vast unity not yet discoverable or nameable. There is food for contemplation which never runs short; you are gazing at an object which is always growing clearer, and yet always, in the very act of growing clearer, presenting new mysteries. — John Robert Seeley

No virtue is safe that is not enthusiastic. — John Robert Seeley

Life may not be beautiful, but it is interesting. — John Robert Seeley

Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics. — John Robert Seeley

No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the clink of trowel and pickaxe; it descended out of heaven from God. — John Robert Seeley

History without politics descends to mere Literature. — John Robert Seeley

It's a withdrawal of love, coupled with rejection. That combination is hard to accept, and often triggers feelings of not good enough, failure at relationship, insecurity, lack of trust and other feelings. — John Robert Seeley