Quote

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.

Augustus William Hare

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Augustus William Hare
Age: 41 †
Born: 1792
Born: November 17
Died: 1834
Died: January 22
Author
Writer
Augustus Hare
Men
Books
Bacon
Hieroglyphics
Read
Mysteries
Aptly
Universe
Preach
Syllable
Understand
Shakespeare
Termed
Nature
Priests
Decipher
Book
Senses
Spectacles
Feel
Mystery
Aristotle
Aeschylus
Feels
Teach
Syllables
Expound

More quotes by Augustus William Hare

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Much of this world's wisdom is still acquired by necromancy,--by consulting the oracular dead.
Augustus William Hare
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Most painters have painted themselves. So have most poets: not so palpably indeed, but more assiduously. Some have done nothing else.
Augustus William Hare
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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.
Augustus William Hare
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Few take advice, or physic, without wry faces at it.
Augustus William Hare
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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.
Augustus William Hare
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Few are aware that they want any thing, except pounds schillings and pence.
Augustus William Hare
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The mind is like a trunk: if well-packed, it holds almost every thing if ill-packed, next to nothing.
Augustus William Hare
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Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources,--one pure, the other impure.
Augustus William Hare
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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.
Augustus William Hare
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Do, and have done. The former is far the easiest.
Augustus William Hare
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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.
Augustus William Hare
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Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.
Augustus William Hare
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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.
Augustus William Hare
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There are men whom you will never dislodge from an opinion, except by taking possession of it yourself.
Augustus William Hare
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Seeking is not always the way to find.
Augustus William Hare
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One saves oneself much pain, by taking pains much trouble, by taking trouble.
Augustus William Hare
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Curiosity is little more than another name for Hope.
Augustus William Hare
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They who disbelieve in virtue because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun because it is not always noon.
Augustus William Hare
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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.
Augustus William Hare
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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.
Augustus William Hare