Norman Douglas Quotes
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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.
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There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook.
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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.
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Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating.
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One can always trust to time. Insert a wedge of time and nearly everything straightens itself out.
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I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.
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There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.
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What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire.
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Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it.
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How often could things be remedied by a word. How often is it left unspoken.
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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.
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What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.
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There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.
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The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying.
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No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble.
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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.
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You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.
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To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him...two.
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It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.
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A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother.
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I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.
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No great man is ever born too soon or too late.
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The business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is a mockery.
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He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity - a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.