Norman Douglas Quotes

Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague. ~ Norman Douglas

There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook. ~ Norman Douglas

The secret of happiness is curiosity ~ Norman Douglas

Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating. ~ Norman Douglas

It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest. ~ Norman Douglas

Harriet, to hide her excitement, had turned to the bookshelves in the corner between the windows and the fireplace. The books, untidily arranged, some standing, some piled on their sides, with newspapers and magazines wedged among them, confused her. There were no sets and a great many were paper-backed. She saw friends - Mr. Dickens was present - and nodding acquaintances - Laurence Sterne, for instance, and Theodore Dreiser - but they were among strangers: Henry Miller, Norman Douglas, Saki, Ronald Firbank, strangers all. ~ Jack Iams

Between the ages of ten and fifteen in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry - English, Russian and French - than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Alexander Blok. On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg, and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library. At a later period, in Western Europe, between the ages of 20 and 40, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Norman Douglas, Bergson, Joyce, Proust, and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several - Poe, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orezy, Conan Doyle, and Rupert Brooke - have lost the glamour and thrill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I grow more intolerant of fools as the years roll on. If I had a son, I was saying, I would take him from school at the age of fourteen, not a moment later, and put him for two years in a commercial house. Wake him up; make an English citizen of him. Teach him how to deal with men as men, to write a straightforward business letter, manage his own money and gain some respect for those industrial movements which control the world. Next, two years in some wilder part of the world, where his own countrymen and equals by birth are settled under primitive conditions, and have formed their rough codes of society. The intercourse with such people would be a capital invested for life. The next two years should be spent in the great towns of Europe, in order to remove awkwardness of manner, prejudices of race and feeling, and to get the outward forms of a European citizen. All this would sharpen his wits, give him more interest in life, more keys to knowledge. It would widen his horizon. Then, and not a minute sooner, to the University, where he would go not as a child but a man capable of enjoying its real advantages, attend lectures with profit, acquire manners instead of mannerisms and a University tone instead of a University taint. ~ Norman Douglas

It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half-rude. ~ Norman Douglas

A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner. ~ Norman Douglas

Learn to foster an ardent imagination; so shall you descry beauty which others passed unheeded. ~ Norman Douglas

To find a friend one must close one eye - to keep him, two. ~ Norman Douglas

History deals with situations and figures not imaginary but real. It demands therefore a combination of qualities unnecessary to the poet or writer of romance - glacial judgment coupled with fervent sympathy. The poet may be an uninspired illiterate, the romance-writer an uninspired hack. Under no circumstances can either of them be accused of wrongdoing or deceiving the public, however incongruous their efforts. They write well or badly, and there the matter ends. The historian, who fails in his duty, deceives the reader and wrongs the dead. ~ Norman Douglas

Oh, I'm going to take them," said Miss Cornelia. "Of course, I was glad to, but Mary would have given me no peace till I asked them any way. The Ladies' Aid is going to clean the manse from top to bottom before the bride and groom come back, and Norman Douglas has arranged to fill the cellar with vegetables. Nobody ever saw or heard anything quite like Norman Douglas these days, believe ME. He's so tickled that he's going to marry Ellen West after wanting her all his life. If I was Ellen - but then, I'm not, and if she is satisfied I can very well be. I heard her say years ago when she was a schoolgirl that she didn't want a tame puppy for a husband. There's nothing tame about Norman, believe ME. ~ L.M. Montgomery

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality. ~ Norman Douglas

Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty. ~ Norman Douglas

A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother. ~ Norman Douglas

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes. ~ Norman Douglas

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things. ~ Norman Douglas

Mr. Keith, by means of some mysterious formula, soon procured two seats in the front row, the occupants of which smilingly took their places among the crowd at the back. ~ Norman Douglas

The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn. ~ Norman Douglas

Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it. ~ Norman Douglas

Mr. Frederick Parker spent a good deal of his time in endeavouring to mask, under a cloak of boisterous good humour, a really remarkable combination of malevolence and imbecility. ~ Norman Douglas

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements. ~ Norman Douglas

We take children from their parents because these cannot give them an intellectual training. So far, good. But we fail to give them that training in character which parents alone can give. Home influence, as Grace Aguilar conceived it - where has it gone? It strikes me that this is a grave danger for the future. ~ Norman Douglas

Nobody can misunderstand a boy like his own mother. Mothers at present can bring children into the world, but this performance is apt to mark the end of their capacities. They can't even attend to the elementary animal requirements of their offspring. It is quite surprising how many children survive in spite of their mothers. ~ Norman Douglas

I think modern education over-emphasizes the intellect. I suppose that comes from the scientific trend of the times. You cannot obtain a useful citizen if you only develop his intellect. We take children from their parents because these cannot give them an intellectual training. So far, good. But we fail to give them that training in character which parents alone can give. Home influence, as Grace Aguilar conceived it where has it gone? It strikes me that this is a grave danger for the future. We are rearing up a brood of crafty egoists, a generation whose earliest recollections are those of getting something for nothing from the State.
I am inclined to trace our present social unrest to this over-valuation of the intellect. It hardens the heart and blights all generous impulses. What is going to replace the home, Mr. Keith? ~ Norman Douglas

The business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is a mockery. ~ Norman Douglas

Justice is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest. ~ Norman Douglas

Ellen and Norman Douglas are warming up the old soup." "Is ~ L.M. Montgomery

Has any man ever obtained inner harmony by simply reading about the experiences of others? Not since the world began has it ever happened. Each man must go through the fire himself. ~ Norman Douglas

Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes. ~ Norman Douglas

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying. ~ Norman Douglas

Why always "not yet"? Do flowers in spring say "not yet"? ~ Norman Douglas

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake. ~ Norman Douglas

The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day. ~ Norman Douglas

You can cram a truth into an epigram - the truth, never. ~ Norman Douglas

How often could things be remedied by a word. How often is it left unspoken. ~ Norman Douglas

Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends. ~ Norman Douglas

The families of our friends are always a disappointment. ~ Norman Douglas

Having learned the trick of beating and loving and suffering, the poor faithful heart persisted, although it lived on memories and carried on its sentimental operations mostly in secret. ~ Kate Douglas Wiggin

In [David] Douglas's success in life ... his great activity, undaunted courage, singular abstemiousness, and energetic zeal, at once pointed him out as an individual eminently calculated to do himself credit as a scientific traveler. ~ Joseph Dalton Hooker

Well, sir, I think it's just as well that they are being phased out of the war effort, and that we are now going to detonate the supernova bomb. In the very short time since we were released from the time envelope-'

'Get to the point'

'The robots aren't enjoying it, sir.'

'what'

'The war sir, it seems to be getting them down there's a certain world-weariness.'

'Well, that's all right, they're meant to be helping to destroy it.'

'yes, well they're finding it difficult, sir. They are afflicted with a certain lassitude. They're just finding it hard to get behind the job. They lack oomph.'

'What are you trying to say?'

'Well, I think they're very depressed about something, sir.'

'What on Krikkit are you talking about?'

'Well, in a few skirmishes they've recently, it seems that they go into battle, raise their weapons to fire and suddenly think, why bother? What, cosmically speaking, is it all about? And they just seem to get a little tired and a little grim.'

'And then what do they do?'

'Er, quadratic equations mostly, sir. Fiendishly difficult ones by all accounts. And then they sulk.'

'Sulk?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Whoever heard of a robot sulking?'

'I don't know, sir. ~ Douglas Adams

I went into rehab to save my marriage, but I wound up saving myself. ~ Michael Douglas

History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster. ~ Douglas MacArthur

The final and best antidote for worry is simply this: Image Jesus Christ as actually your personal friend. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

We all know the feeling of surrendering to the embedded biases of our devices. We let our cell phones ping us every time there's an incoming message and check our e-mail even when we'd best pay attention to what's going on around us in the real world. We text while driving. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

I wouldn't mind if the consumer culture went poof! overnight because then we'd all be in the same boat and life wouldn't be so bad, mucking about with the chickens and feudalism and the like. But you know what would be absolutely horrible. The worst? ... If, as we were all down on earth wearing rags and husbanding pigs inside abandoned Baskin-Robbins franchises, I were to look up in the sky and see a jet
with just one person inside even
I'd go berserk. I'd go crazy. Either everyone slides back into the Dark Ages or no one does. ~ Douglas Coupland

We all know what feminists are. They are shrill, overly aggressive, man-hating, ball-busting, selfish, hairy, extremist, deliberately unattractive women with absolutely no sense of humor who see sexism at every turn. They make men's testicles shrivel up to the size of peas, they detest the family and think all children should be deported or drowned. ~ Susan J. Douglas

To cure worry, spend fifteen minutes daily filling your mind full of God. Worry is just a very bad mental habit. You can change any habit with God's help. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

The real wealth, not only of America, but of the world, is in the resources of the ground we stand on, and in the resources of the humankind. ~ Norman Cousins

You like all animals at that moment, although no doubt you will one day choose your favorites. Your own nature will triumph. We are all born with our natures. You popped out of your mother's belly, I saw your eyes, and I knew that you were already you. And I think back over my own life and I realize that my own nature
the core me
essentially hasn't changed over all these years. When I wake up in the morning, for those first few moments before I remember where I am or when I am, I still feel the same way I did when I woke up at the age of five. Sometimes I wonder if natures can be changed at all of if we are stuck with them as surely as a dog wants bones or as a cat chases mice. ~ Douglas Coupland

Well we are hoping that the power of the community of free nations is such that our sovereignty our rights are not going to be challenged by anybody who's going try to undermine the freedom, the openness of our societies and our security. ~ Douglas Feith

But if the views of some migrant communities on homosexuality were only a couple of generations out of date, the views of portions of those communities on the subject of women were shown to be out of date by many centuries, at least. ~ Douglas Murray

Criticism is a profession which allows one a certain license to be vicious outside the bounds of normal civilized behavior. ~ Douglas Preston

It was what he had waited for all these years, but when he had deciphered the signal pattern sitting alone in his small dark room, a coldness had gripped him and squeezed his heart. Of all the races in all of the Galaxy who could have come and said a big hello to planet Earth, he thought, didn't it just have to be the Vogons. ~ Douglas Adams

That's why moderns have to have hobbies. They can't find satisfaction in their money-earning work, so many seek creative satisfaction in model planes and trains. ~ Douglas Wilson

That questionable superfluity small beer. ~ Douglas William Jerrold

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioural research laboratories running around inside wheels and conduction frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted this relationship was entirely according to these creatures' plans. ~ Douglas Adams

Once a teen has been identified as part of the 'target market,' he knows he's done for. The object of the game is to confound the marketers, and keep one's own, authentic culture from showing up at the shopping mall as a prepackaged corporate product. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

If you scratch through the deceitful artifice of contemporary photography, you'll find the real artifice underneath. ~ Douglas McCulloh

the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These thing ~ G.K. Chesterton

If God drives a car, He'd drive a 1973 Ford LTD Brougham sedan with a claret-colored vinyl roof, with oxblood leather upholstery and an opera window. ~ Douglas Coupland

Common sense isn't as common as its name implies ~ Douglas Thompson

David Cameron wants people to believe that his isolation in Europe is a result of Britain being outnumbered when it matters most. ~ Douglas Alexander

The quality of health care in Canada is excellent. ~ Michael Douglas

Because there are some things you have to do even if you are an enlightened liberal cop who knows all about sensitivity and everything! ~ Douglas Adams

The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with the nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindbogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen it to see it as a final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.
The argument goes something like this: "I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."
"But," says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED."
"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
"Oh, that was easy," says Man, and for an encore goes on to prov ~ Douglas Adams

The student ends up lusting after time with the teacher, hanging on her every word, and forgetting that this is about him or her, the student, not the teacher. ~ Zoketsu Norman Fischer

Hate is a prolonged form of suicide. ~ Douglas V. Steere

I've got to tell you what, the soldier doesn't fight very hard for a leader who is going to shoot him, okay, on his own whim. That's not what military leadership is all about. ~ Norman Schwarzkopf

I miss my dog," he wrote to Maria. "I don't really miss my mother." Dogs offer unconditional and nonjudgmental love. Mothers don't always. ~ John E. Douglas

Sure, one can always get the students to relax and be happy - entertained, but although being laid back and relax can also lead to creativity, mostly it means that nothing much gets done. ~ Donald Norman

Feeling unique is no indication of uniqueness. ~ Douglas Coupland

Deep within the individual is a vast reservoir of untapped power awaiting to be used. no person can have the use of all this potential until he learns to know his or her own self. the trouble with many people is that they got through life thinking and writing themselves off as ordinary commonplace persons. having no proper belief in themselves they live aimless and erratic lives largely because they never realize what their lives really can be or what they can become ~ Norman Vincent Peale

Education is the process of selling someone on books. ~ Douglas Wilson

If natural selection can create creationists it can manage a caterpillar with a face on its arse. ~ Zane Stumpo

I'm just a storyteller. ~ Norman Jewison

Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. ~ Douglas Adams

Blacker than the night, the wedge penetrated the darkness. An F 117 raced by, the roar from its engines screaming through the interior of the chopper, and then it sliced away a piece of sky and disappeared into the void.
-Narrator, Truth Insurrected: The Saint Mary Project ~ Daniel P. Douglas

I came to believe that health services ought not to have a price tag on them, and that people should be able to get whatever health services they required irrespective of their individual capacity to pay. ~ Tommy Douglas

I will say that my days are spent solitary and somewhat lost in thought, and every single time I inadvertently wear my shirt inside out in public, I bump into my sister-in-law at the grocery store. ~ Douglas Coupland

The world is full of bastards, the number increasing rapidly the further one gets from Missoula, Montana. ~ Norman Maclean

The book was sloppily written in many parts (the words came too quickly and too easily) and there was hardly a noun in any sentence that was not holding hands with the nearest and most commonly available adjective - scalding coffee and tremulous fear are the sorts of thing you will find throughout. Over-certified adjectives are the mark of most best-seller writing. ~ Norman Mailer

Roth was irritated. Just because he was a Jew too, they always assumed he felt the same way about things. It made him feel a little frustrated. No doubt some of his bad luck had come because he was one, but that was unfair; it wasn't as if he took an interest, it was just an accident of birth. ~ Norman Mailer

The advent of cellphones may, in the end, be no more relevant than the ability of laptops to change our written documents into ones using cool new fonts. ~ Douglas Coupland