Philip Gilbert Hamerton Quotations

We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

The only hope of preserving what is best, lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours.

Culture is like wealth; it makes us more ourselves, it enables us to express ourselves

A perfect life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline, but can also go forth alone in the solitude of the infinite sea. We ought to belong to society, to have our place in it, and yet be capable of a complete individual existence outside of it.

The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.

In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.

High culture always isolates, always drives men out of their class, and makes it more difficult for them to share naturally and easily the common class-life around them. They seek the few companions who can understand them, and when these are not to be had within a traversable distance, they sit and work alone.

Thackeray and Balzac will make it possible for our descendants to live over again the England and France of to-day. Seen in this light, the novelist has a higher office than merely and amuse his contemporaries.

The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again.

Few of us have been so exceptionally unfortunate as not to find, in our own age, some experienced friend who has helped us by precious counsel, never to be forgotten. We cannot render it in kind, but perhaps in the fulness of time it may become our noblest duty to aid another as we have ourselves been aided, and to transmit to him an invaluable treasure, the tradition of the intellectual life.

Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is, by these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age.

Society will be obeyed; if you refuse obedience, you must take the consequences. Society has only one law, and that is custom. Even religion itself is socially powerful only just so far as it has custom on its side.

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.

I wonder how it is that so cheerful-looking a tree as the willow should ever have become associated with ideas of sadness.

Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure.

Conversation is interesting in proportion to the originality of the central ideas which serve as pivots and the fitness of the little facts and observations which are contributed by the talkers.

Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life.

What delights us in the spring is more a sensation than an appearance, more a hope than any visible reality. There is something in the softness of the air, in the lengthening of the days, in the very sounds and odors of the sweet time, that caresses us and consoles us after the rigorous weeks of winter.

Unless a man works he cannot find out what he is able to do.

The opinions of men who think are always growing and changing, like living children.

The one mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the gift of half-genius, is waiting for inspiration.

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.

You may have a cat in the room with you without anxiety about anything except eatables. The presence of a cat is positively soothing to a student.

People have prejudices against a nation in which they have no acquaintances.

All that we have read and learned, all that has occupied and interested us in the thoughts and deeds of men abler or wiser than ourselves, constitutes at last a spiritual society of which we can never be deprived, for it rests in the heart and soul of the man who has acquired it.

Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention.

Never be afraid of What is good; the good is always the road to what is true.

Society is, and must be, based upon appearances, and not upon the deepest appearances, and not realities.