Lynd Quotes & Sayings

The spurned diagnosis
Shame
"By shame, I have in mind the terrible, at times unfathomable, feeling of being outcast from human society, of being shunned and spurned, of being wanted by no one, and having no one who empathizes with you (Lynd 1958). Part of this experience of shame is the focus on the inadequacies of oneself in the eyes of others and oneself, and of feeling mortified, wanting to disappear, to hide inside a crack in the wall (Lewis 1971). — Elizabeth Howell

It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers. — Robert Wilson Lynd

There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before. — Robert Lynd

Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature. — Robert Wilson Lynd

There are travelers who fear to own delicate hands more than to meet a lion, and soldiers who would rather lose a limb than gain a beautiful nose by artificial methods. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Mystery lies over the sea. Every ship is bound for Thule. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive. — Robert Lynd

The telephone is the greatest nuisance among conveniences, the greatest convenience among nuisances. — Robert Staughton Lynd

Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside. — Robert Wilson Lynd

One of the sources of pride in being a human being is the ability to bear present frustrations in the interests of longer purposes. — Helen Lynd

Our whole life is an attempt to discover when our spontaneity is whimsical, sentimental irresponsibility and when it is a valid expression of our deepest desires and values. — Helen Lynd

One of the greatest joys known to man is to take a flight into ignorance in search of knowledge. — Robert Staughton Lynd

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left. — Robert Staughton Lynd

Friendship is not going to stand the pressure of greatly great guidance for quite extensive. — Robert Staughton Lynd

In a family, when I as son, husband, or father, express love toward you, I do not do so in order to assure myself of love in return. I do not help my son in order to be able to claim assistance from him when I am old; I do it because he and I are in the world together, we are one flesh. Similarly in a workplace, persons who work together form families-at-work. When you and I are working together, and the foreman suddenly discharges you, and I find myself putting down my tools or stopping my machine before I have had time to think - why do I do this? Is it not because, as I actually experience the event, your discharge does not happen only to you but also happens to us?3 — Staughton Lynd

W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Darling, the bath's absolutely right. Will you marry me?'
She snorted. 'You need a slave, not a wife. — Ian Fleming

When the last Puritan has disappeared from the earth, the man of science will take his place as a killjoy, and we shall be given the same old advice but for different reasons. — Robert Staughton Lynd

I sometimes suspect that half our difficulties are imaginary and that if we kept quiet about them they would disappear. — Robert Staughton Lynd

Most human beings are quite likeable if you do not see too much of them. — Robert Wilson Lynd

It is in games that many men discover their paradise. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Most remarks that are worth making are commonplace remarks. The things that makes them worth saying is that we really mean them. — Robert Staughton Lynd

[History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity. — Robert Staughton Lynd

Almost any game with any ball is a good game. — Robert Staughton Lynd

On the whole, however, the critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes imagined. He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is not concerned with getting rid of dross except in so far as it hides the gold. In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a subsidiary affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructive minds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers than with the weeds. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Friendship will not stand the strain of very much good advice for very long. — Robert Staughton Lynd

This is woman's great benevolence, that she will become a martyr for beauty, so that the world may have pleasure. — Robert Wilson Lynd

We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing. — Robert Wilson Lynd

In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence. — Robert Lynd

We cannot get happiness by striving after it, and yet with an effort we can impart it. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Most human beings are quite likable if you don't see too much of them. — Robert Wilson Lynd

The happiness even of the naturalist depends in some measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each bright particular with his eyes. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Most of us believe in trying to make other people happy only if they can be happy in ways which we approve. — Robert Staughton Lynd

Black civil rights activists in the South were among the first to resist the draft. SNCC's Bob Moses joined historian Staughton Lynd and veteran pacifist Dave Dellinger to march in Washington against the war, and Life Magazine had a dramatic photo of the three of them walking abreast, being splattered with red paint by angry super-patriots. — Howard Zinn

There are two sorts of curiosity - the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things. — Robert Wilson Lynd

There are some people who want to throw their arms round you simply because it is Christmas; there are other people who want to strangle you simply because it is Christmas. — Robert Staughton Lynd

The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense
it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Every man of genius is considerably helped by being dead. — Robert Staughton Lynd

The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth. — Robert Wilson Lynd

A boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet. — Robert Wilson Lynd

No man is uninteresting when his hat is blown off and he has to scuttle after it down the street. — Robert Wilson Lynd

The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions. — Robert Wilson Lynd

It is doubtful if even experience of riches and success is as intense among those who have experienced nothing else as among those who have also experienced poverty and failure. There is little romance in wealth to those who have been born wealthy and whose families have been wealthy for generations. — Robert Wilson Lynd

A cat is only technically an animal, being divine. — Robert Lynd

Knowledge is power only if man knows what facts not to bother with. — Robert Staughton Lynd

There is nothing that makes us feel so good as the idea that someone else is an evildoer. — Robert Lynd

It may be that all games are silly. But then, so are humans. — Robert Lynd

Any of us can achieve virtue, if by virtue we merely mean the avoidance of the vices that do not attract us. — Robert Staughton Lynd

It is easier to believe a lie that one has heard a thousand times than to believe a fact that one has never heard before. — Robert Lynd

Freedom which has genuine meaning is more than a timeless abstraction, more than an absence of restraints. — Helen Lynd

It is a glorious thing to be indifferent to suffering, but only to one's own suffering. — Robert Lynd

Chekhov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy. — Robert Wilson Lynd

With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth. He knew the birds of the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than the children. — Robert Wilson Lynd

It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Fletcher Lynd Seagull was still quite young, but already he knew that no bird had ever been so harshly treated by any Flock, or with so much injustice. — Richard Bach

Most of us can remember a time when a birthday - especially if it was one's own - brightened the world as if a second sun has risen. — Robert Staughton Lynd

The lovers of beauty must unite in a league, and carry out some great propagandist work through the country. They must demand the extermination of the bulldog and the dismantling of the cheap villa, both of which are responsible for a deal of our contentment amid ugliness. — Robert Wilson Lynd

No human being believes that any other human being has a right to be in bed when he himself is up. — Robert Lynd

Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as he began to moult ... one saw how very little body there was underneath. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw. — Robert Wilson Lynd

If the poets offered us nothing more than another make-believe world, they would be mere sellers of drugs or, at best, sweetmeats. — Robert Lynd

When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility. — Robert Wilson Lynd

Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news. — Robert Wilson Lynd

The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest. — Robert Lynd

The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about. — Robert Wilson Lynd