Quote

The crown of life is neither happiness nor annihilation it is understanding.

Winifred Holtby

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Winifred Holtby
Age: 37 †
Born: 1898
Born: June 23
Died: 1935
Died: September 29
Author
Journalist
Novelist
Suffragette
Writer
Rudston
East Riding of Yorkshire
Life
Annihilation
Crown
Crowns
Neither
Understanding
Happiness

More quotes by Winifred Holtby

Image
We're so busy resigning ourselves to the inevitable that we don't even ask if it is inevitable. We've got to have courage, to take our future into our hands. If the law is oppressive, we must change the law. If tradition is obstructive, we must break tradition. If the system is unjust, we must reform the system.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Nature is not silent, and never was a name more derisively inappropriate than when we speak of these non-human creatures who hoot and crow and bray as the dumb animals.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Really, trees are nearly as important as men, and much better behaved.
Winifred Holtby
Image
But to write - that is grief and labor and to read what one has written - how unlike the story as one saw it how dull, how spirtless - that is enough to send one weeping to bed.
Winifred Holtby
Image
There's never been a lack of men willing to die bravely. The trouble is to find a few able to live sensibly.
Winifred Holtby
Image
the damned book I am writing is like the driveling of a weak-kneed sea calf. If I were sufficiently strong minded, I should tear it up an start again. But I don't.
Winifred Holtby
Image
I can't think why I was cursed with this inordinate desire to write, if the high gods weren't going to give me some more adquate means of expressing myself than that which my present pedestrian prose affords.
Winifred Holtby
Image
But questioning does not mean the end of loving, and loving does not mean the abnegation of intelligence
Winifred Holtby
Image
Those who prepare for war get it.
Winifred Holtby
Image
we are so little, so ignorant, so feeble an infant race crawling on a planet between immensities we haven't even begun to understand, that really we have no grounds for either congratulation or despair.
Winifred Holtby
Image
[On golf:] One of the most distressing defects of civilization.
Winifred Holtby
Image
We each live in a private, distorted, individual world - stars turning in space, warmed for a moment by each other's light, then lost in infinite distance.
Winifred Holtby
Image
A sense of humor is so handy, isn't it? It lets you see both sides of a question so that you never need do anything.
Winifred Holtby
Image
The world, with all its beauty and adventure, its richness and variety, is darkened by cruelty. Death, if it ends the loveliness, the adventure, ends also that. Death balances the picture.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Most gay, conversational, careless, lovely city ... where one drinks golden Tokay until one feels most beautiful, and warm and loved - oh, Budapesth!
Winifred Holtby
Image
All adventuring is rash, and all innovations dangerous. But not nearly so dangerous as stagnation and dry rot. From grooves, cliques, clichés and resignation - Good Lord deliver us!
Winifred Holtby
Image
I find you in all small and lovely things in the little fishes like flames in the green water, in the furred and stupid softness of bumble-bees fat as laughter, in all the chiming radiance of warmth and light and scent in the summer garden.
Winifred Holtby
Image
The more I see of dogs, the more I like children.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Love needs the stiffening of respect, the give and take of equality.
Winifred Holtby
Image
Surely, if life is good, it is good throughout its substance we cannot separate men's activities from women's and say, these are worthy of praise and these unworthy.
Winifred Holtby