Best 44 quotes of Norman Douglas on MyQuotes

A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.

A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother.

Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.

Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty.

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

Has any man ever obtained inner harmony by simply reading about the experiences of others? Not since the world began has it ever happened. Each man must go through the fire himself.

He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity - a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

How often could things be remedied by a word. How often is it left unspoken.

I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.

It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.

I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.

Justice is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest.

Learn to foster an ardent imagination; so shall you descry beauty which others passed unheeded.

Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.

Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it.

Nobody can misunderstand a boy like his own mother. Mothers at present can bring children into the world, but this performance is apt to mark the end of their capacities. They can't even attend to the elementary animal requirements of their offspring. It is quite surprising how many children survive in spite of their mothers.

No great man is ever born too soon or too late.

One can always trust to time. Insert a wedge of time and nearly everything straightens itself out.

People who have reformed themselves has contributed their full share towards the reformation of their neighbor.

Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague.

The business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is a mockery.

The families of our friends are always a disappointment.

The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day.

The pine stays green in winter... wisdom in hardship.

The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit.

There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook.

There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.

The secret of happiness is curiosity

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying.

The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn.

They who are all things to their neighbors cease to be anything to themselves.

To find a friend one must close one eye. To keep him...two.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings—they are so trite, so threadbare, that we can hardly bring our lips to utter them. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teaching cannot go far wrong. How easy that seems! Has any one ever done so? Never. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through the fire.

Why always "not yet"?  Do flowers in spring say "not yet"?

You can construct the character of a man and his age not only from what he does and says, but from what he fails to say and do.

You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

I grow more intolerant of fools as the years roll on. If I had a son, I was saying, I would take him from school at the age of fourteen, not a moment later, and put him for two years in a commercial house. Wake him up; make an English citizen of him. Teach him how to deal with men as men, to write a straightforward business letter, manage his own money and gain some respect for those industrial movements which control the world. Next, two years in some wilder part of the world, where his own countrymen and equals by birth are settled under primitive conditions, and have formed their rough codes of society. The intercourse with such people would be a capital invested for life. The next two years should be spent in the great towns of Europe, in order to remove awkwardness of manner, prejudices of race and feeling, and to get the outward forms of a European citizen. All this would sharpen his wits, give him more interest in life, more keys to knowledge. It would widen his horizon. Then, and not a minute sooner, to the University, where he would go not as a child but a man capable of enjoying its real advantages, attend lectures with profit, acquire manners instead of mannerisms and a University tone instead of a University taint.

I think modern education over-emphasizes the intellect. I suppose that comes from the scientific trend of the times. You cannot obtain a useful citizen if you only develop his intellect. We take children from their parents because these cannot give them an intellectual training. So far, good. But we fail to give them that training in character which parents alone can give. Home influence, as Grace Aguilar conceived it " where has it gone? It strikes me that this is a grave danger for the future. We are rearing up a brood of crafty egoists, a generation whose earliest recollections are those of getting something for nothing from the State. I am inclined to trace our present social unrest to this over-valuation of the intellect. It hardens the heart and blights all generous impulses. What is going to replace the home, Mr. Keith?

Mr. Keith, by means of some mysterious formula, soon procured two seats in the front row, the occupants of which smilingly took their places among the crowd at the back.

The land is encrusted with ephemeral human conceits. That is not altogether good for a youngster; it disarranges his mind and puts him out of harmony with what is permanent. Just listen a moment. Here, if you are wise, you will seek an antidote. Taken in over-dose, all these churches and pictures and books and other products of our species are toxins for a boy like you. They falsify your cosmic values. Try to be more of an animal. Try to extract pleasure from more obvious sources. Lie fallow for a while. Forget all these things. Go out into the midday glare. Sit among rocks and by the sea. Have a look at the sun and stars for a change; they arc just as impressive as Donatello. Find yourself! You know the Cave of Mercury? Climb down, one night of full moon, all alone, and rest at its entrance. Familiarize yourself with elemental things. The whole earth reeks of humanity and its works. One has to be old and tough to appraise them at their true worth. Tell people to go to Hell, Denis, with their altar-pieces and museums and clock- towers and funny little art-galleries.