William Hurrell Mallock Quotes

The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one another.

But will you be able to say what is right and what is wrong any longer, if you don't know for whom anything is right and for whom anything is wrong--whether it is for men with immortal souls, or only with mortal bodies--who are only a little lower than the angels, or only a little better than the pigs? Whilst you can still contrive to doubt upon this matter, whilst the fabric of the old faith is still dissolving only, life still for you, the enlightened few, may preserve what happiness it has now. But when the old fabric is all dissolved, what then? When all divinity shall have gone from love and heroism, and only utility and pleasure shall be left, what then?

Socialism may be worthless as a scheme, but it is not meaningless as a symptom. Rousseau's theory of the origin of society, of the social contract, and of a cure for all the social evils by a return to a state of nature, had, as we all know now, no more relation to fact than the dreams of an illiterate drunkard; but they were not without value as a vague and symbolical expression of certain evils from which the France of his day was suffering.

A change was coming over the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era. - Froude's History of England, ch. i.

The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages.

No one is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for a moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and take account not only of what the adversary says, but also the best he MIGHT say, if only he had chanced to think it.

Landscapes, even when their general type is similar, are capable of as many expressions as the same type of human face, and, without our being able fully to tell why, affect our spirits as we look at them with as many moods and meanings.

Was my guide a person who would expect what is vulgary called a "tip"? Or was his position so high that even to offer it would be an insult?

And with distance in time it is the same as with distance in place. The imagination has its atmosphere and its sunlight as well as the earth has; only its mists are even more gorgeous and delicate, its aerial perspectives are even more wide and profound. It also transifgures and beautifies things in far more various ways. For the imagination is all senses in one; it is sight, it is smell, it is hearing; it is memory, regret, and passion. Everything goes to nourish it, from first love to literature - literature, which, for cultivated people, is the imagination's gastric juice.

Civilisation is never so charming as when it is an island in the middle of simplicity, or of a civilisation of an alien kind.

Most of man's finest heroism is merely disguised necessity.

Politics are always a struggle for power, disguised and modified by prudence, reason and moral pretext.