Augustus William Hare quotes:

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.

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.

It is said that Windham, when he came to the end of a speech, often found himself so perplexed by his own subtlety that he hardly knew which way he was going to give his vote. This is a good illustration of the fallaciousness of reasoning, and of the uncertainties which attend its practical application.

There is as much difference between good poetry and fine verses, as between the smell of a flower-garden and of a perfumer's shop.

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

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

Some persons take reproof good-humoredly enough, unless you are so unlucky as to hit a sore place. Then they wince and writhe, and start up and knock you down for your impertinence, or wish you good morning.

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

Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it.

Books, as Dryden has aptly termed them, are spectacles to read nature. Aeschylus and Aristotle, Shakespeare and Bacon, are priests who preach and expound the mysteries of man and the universe. They teach us to understand and feel what we see, to decipher and syllable the hieroglyphics of the senses.

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

Light, when suddenly let in, dazzles and hurts and almost blinds us: but this soon passes away, and it seems to become the only element we can exist in.

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

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

They who boast of their tolerance merely give others leave to be as careless about religion as they are themselves. A walrus might as well pride itself on its endurance of cold.

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.

People cannot go wrong, if you don't let them. They cannot go right, unless you let them.

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.

It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him before he is old enough to know the sense of it.

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

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

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.

Life is the hyphen between matter and spirit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains; much trouble, by taking trouble.

A person should go out on the water on a fine day to a small distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see Nature really smile. Never does she look so delightful, as when the sun is brightly reflected by the water, while the waves are gently rippling, and the prospect receives life and animation from the glancing transit of an occasional row-boat, and the quieter motion of a few small vessels. But the land must be well in sight; not only for its own sake, but because the immensity and awfulness of a mere sea-view would ill accord with the other parts of the glittering and joyous scene.

Seeking is not always the way to find.

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.

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

There are men whom you will never dislodge from an opinion, except by taking possession of it yourself.

Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.

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.

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.

What do our clergy lose by reading their sermons? They lose preaching, the preaching of the voice in many cases, the preaching of the eye almost always.

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.

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

The poet sees things as they look. Is this having a faculty the less? or a sense the more?

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets.

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

There is a glare about worldly success which is very apt to dazzle men's eyes.

Christianity has carried civilization along with it, whithersoever it has gone; and, as if to show that the latter does not depend on physical causes, some of the countries the most civilized in the day's of Augustus are now in a state of hopeless barbarism.

When a watch goes ill, it is not enough to move the hands; you must set the regulator. When a man does ill, it is not enough to alter his handiwork, you must regulate his heart.

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.

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

Much of this world's wisdom is still acquired by necromancy,--by consulting the oracular dead.

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.

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

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

Just, harmonious, temperate as is the spirit of liberty, there is in the name and mere notion of it a vagueness so opposite to the definite clearness of the moral law....

I bid you conquer in your warfare against your four great enemies, the world, the devil, the flesh, and above all, that obstinate and perverse self-will, unaided by which the other three would be comparatively powerless.

Who is fit to govern others? He who governs himself. You might as well have said: nobody.

In science its main worth is temporary, as a stepping-stone to something beyond. Even [Newton's] Principia ... is truly but the beginning of a natural philosophy. Co-author with his brother Julius Hare.

How few are our real wants! and how easy is it to satisfy them! Our imaginary ones are boundless and insatiable.

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.

Nobody who is afraid of laughing, and heartily too, at his friend, can be said to have a true and thorough love for him.

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!

Histories used often to be stories: the fashion now is to leave out the story. Our histories are stall-fed: the facts are absorbed by the reflexions, as the meat is sometimes by the fat.

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.

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.

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

...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...

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.

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.

When will talkers refrain from evil speaking? When listeners refrain from evil hearing. At present there are many so credulous of evil, they will receive suspicions and impressions against persons whom they don't know, from a person whom they do know--an authority good for nothing.

Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Philosophy cannot raise the commonalty up to her level: so, if she is to become popular, she must sink to theirs.

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

Do, and have done. The former is far the easiest.

Few are aware that they want any thing, except pounds schillings and pence.

It is natural that affluence should be followed by influence.

When will talkers refrain from evil speaking: when listeners refrain from evil-hearing.

Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.

Every wise man lives in an observatory.

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

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

Forms and regularity of proceeding, if they are not justice, partake much of the nature of justice, which, in its highest sense, is the spirit of distributive order.

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.

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

Instead of watching the bird as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and, finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.

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.