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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Like
Brought
Coloring
Mountain
Gaudy
Passion
Idealism
Knowledge
Fades
White
Beneath
Light
Mountains
Best
Ideals
Matter
Distance
Trenchant

More quotes by Ellen Glasgow

Image
... to be literary appeared to my deluded innocence as an unending romance.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
It is only in the heart that anything really happens.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
there are times when life surprises one, and anything may happen, even what one had hoped for.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
The pathos of life is worse than the tragedy.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
Doesn't all experience crumble in the end to mere literary material?
Ellen Glasgow
Image
Youth is the season of tragedy and despair. Youth is the time when one's whole life is entangled in a web of identity, in a perpetual maze of seeking and of finding, of passion and of disillusion, of vague longings and of nameless griefs, of pity that is a blade in the heart, and of 'all the little emptiness of love.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
... the life of the mind is reality, and love without romantic illumination is a spiritless matter.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
Of one thing alone I am very sure: it is a law of our nature that the memory of longing should survive the more fugitive memory of fulfillment.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
a self-made martyr is a poor thing.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
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.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
nations decay from within more often than they surrender to outward assault.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
Theories have nothing to do with life.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
You look as if you had lived on duty and it hadn't agreed with you.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
. . . this rage - I have never forgotten it - contained every anger, every revolt I had ever felt in my life - the way I felt when I saw the black dog hunted, the way I felt when I watched old Uncle Henry taken away to the almshouse, the way I felt whenever I had seen people or animals hurt for the pleasure or profit of others.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
... 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.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
1. Always wait between books for the springs to fill up and flow over. 2. Always preserve within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reveries. 3. Always, and as far as it is possible, endeavor to touch life on every side but keep the central vision of the mind, the inmost light, untouched and untouchable.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
The nearer she came to death, the more, by some perversity of nature, did she enjoy living.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That's why they all look so sad.
Ellen Glasgow
Image
... though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror.
Ellen Glasgow