“You've never lived what you are thinking, and that isn't good. Only the ideas we actually live are of any value.”
Thoughtful feeling
Thoughtful Quotes — page 150 of 303
“One of the disadwantages of school and learning, he thought dreamily, was that the mind seemed to have the tendency too see and represent all things as though they were flat and had only two dimensions. This, somehow, seemed to render all matters of intellect shallow and worthless.”
“When a writer receives praise or blame, when he arouses sympathy or is ridiculed, when he is loved or rejected, it is not on the strength of his thoughts and dreams as a whole, but only of that infinitesimal part which has been able to make its way through the narrow channel of language and the equally narrow channel of the reader's understanding.”
“All men of goodwill have this in common - that our works put us to shame.”
“It should be possible to exist with only a short shelf of books, to read and give away. After all - we may not open a book, once read, for ten years or more. But the act of reading has made it part of us - to relinquish it would be to lose an extension of our being.”
“things which in my mind blossom will stumble beneath a clumsiest disguise appear capable of fragility and indecision”
“Life's very difficult and full of surprises. At all events, I've got as far as that. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather than pity them, to remember the submerged - well, one can't do all these things at once, worse luck, because they're so contradictory. It's then that proportion comes in - to live by proportion. Don't begin with proportion. Only prigs do that. Let proportion come in as a last resource, when the better things have failed.”
“People in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.”
“It was curious that when we had been able to buy new clothes when we wanted we had never really appreciated them nor enjoyed them. You have to be in the position of needing things very badly indeed before you can appreciate possessing them.”
“But I think we need to remember that democracy everywhere is by its nature incomplete, a work in progress.”
“I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence.”
“We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge.”
“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness.”
“No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”
“What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.”
“The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.”
“The search for a "suitable" church makes the man a critic where God wants him to be a pupil. What he wants from the layman in church is an attitude which may, indeed, be critical in the sense of rejecting what is false or unhelpful but which is wholly uncritical in the sense that it does not appraise- does not waste time in thinking about what it rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity to any nourishment that is going.”
“Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.”
“Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading”
“You can't really study people; you can only get to know them.”