Augustus William Hare Quotes

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.

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 ...

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!

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

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.

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.

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.

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

Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,
one pure, the other impure.

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

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.

Why do critics make such an outcry against tragicomedies? is not life one?

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Poetry is to philosophy what the Sabbath is to the rest of the week.

Friendship is Love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil.

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

Philosophy is the love of wisdom: Christianity is the wisdom of love.

It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Every wise man lives in an observatory.

The most mischievous liars are those who keep sliding on the verge of truth.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Seeking is not always the way to find.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

A lawyer's brief will be brief, before a freethinker thinks freely.

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.

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

A youth's love is the more passionate; virgin love is the more idolatrous.

I like the smell of a dunged field, and the tumult of a popular election.

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.

The feeling is often the deeper truth, the opinion the more superficial one.

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.