Quote

idealism, that gaudy coloring matter of passion, fades when it is brought beneath the trenchant white light of knowledge. Ideals, like mountains, are best at a distance.

Ellen Glasgow

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Ellen Glasgow
Age: 71 †
Born: 1874
Born: April 22
Died: 1945
Died: November 21
Essayist
Novelist
Poet
Suffragette
Writer
Richmond
Virginia
Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
Matter
Distance
Trenchant
Like
Brought
Coloring
Mountain
Gaudy
Passion
Idealism
Knowledge
Fades
White
Beneath
Light
Mountains
Best
Ideals

More quotes by Ellen Glasgow

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Surely one of the peculiar habits of circumstances is the way they follow, in their eternal recurrence, a single course. If an event happens once in a life, it may be depended upon to repeat later its general design.
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Youth is always an enemy to the old.
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It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.
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After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o'clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour
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I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.
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It is difficult to deal successfully, he decided, with a woman whose feelings cannot be hurt.
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I am inclined to believe that a man may be free to do anything he pleases if only he will accept responsibility for whatever he does.
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To mourn was distressing, but to endeavor to mourn and fail was worse than distress.
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To teach one's self is to be forced to learn twice.
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... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.
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The share of the sympathetic publisher in the author's success - the true success so different from the ephemeral - is apt to be overlooked in these blatant days, so it is just as well that some of us should keep it in mind.
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The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization.
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It is human nature to overestimate the thing you've never had.
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Theories have nothing to do with life.
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... beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.
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I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember.
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The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.
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Cruelty, I truly believe, is the one and only sin.
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you could have forgiven my committing a sin if you hadn't feared that I had a committed a pleasure as well.
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To drink for pleasure may be a distraction, but to drink from misery is always a danger.
Ellen Glasgow