Quotes from James Hilton

Perhaps the exhaustion of the passions is the beginning of wisdom, if you care to alter the proverb.

Life's more important than a living. So many people who make a living are making death, not life. Don't ever join them. They're the gravediggers of our civilization - The safe men. The compromisers. The moneymakers. The muddlers-through. Politics is full of them... so is businesses... so is the church. They're popular. Successful. Some of them work hard, other are slack, but all of them could tell a good story. Never where there such charming gravediggers in the world's history.

explained Conway, "is a slang word meaning a lazy fellow, a good-for-nothing.

He was surprised to find that beyond his puzzlement he had few misgivings, and none at all on his own behalf. There were moments in life when one opened wide one's soul just as one might open wide one's purse if an evening's entertainment were proving unexpectedly costly but also unexpectedly novel.

It is a fragile thing that can only live where fragile things are loved.

What most observers failed to perceive in him was something quite bafflingly simple—a love of quietness, contemplation, and being alone.

The will of God or the lunacy of man—it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things.

she really did possess a love for humanity, and the further removed humanity was, both in space and time, the more she loved it.

And what if it's a trap?" asked Mallinson, but Barnard supplied an answer. "A nice warm trap," he said, "with a piece of cheese in it, would suit me down to the ground.

He was not much of a nature-worshipper, but he perceived that nature here was certainly at her best and liveliest. He gave her, as it were, full marks and a nod of approval, feeling that she would do very nicely as a background to his satisfying emotions

Touchy, no sense of humor, no sense of proportion—that was the matter with them, these new fellows... No sense of proportion. And it was a sense of proportion, above all things, that Brookfield ought to teach

Let us hope, however, that they will not forget the spirit of tolerance which to-day is in such grave peril because it is in the very nature of tolerance to take tolerance for granted.

Well, it wasn't safe. It couldn't be. There isn't safety anywhere, and those who thought there was were like a lot of saps trying to hide under an umbrella in a typhoon.

Laziness in doing stupid things can be a virtue.

There can be no war to end wars, because all wars begin other wars. There can be no such thing as a war to save democracy, because all wars destroy democracy. There could have been a peace to save what was left of democracy, but the chance of that came and went in 1919—the saddest year in all the martyrdom of man.

But besides all that, he was a man one simply didn't make mistakes about—to see him once was to know him always.

Miss Brinklow, however, was not yet to be sidetracked, "What do the lamas do?" she continued. "They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom." "But that isn't doing anything." "Then, madam, they do nothing." "I thought as much.

True that Huxley was attacked for teaching that men and monkeys were somewhat the same; but he was never exiled for refusing to teach that Jews and Gentiles were altogether different.

_ What do the [monks] do? [...] _ They devote themselves, madam, to contemplation and to the pursuit of wisdom. _ But that isn't *doing* anything. _ Then, madam, they do nothing. _ I thought as much.

Occasionally throughout the ages, the clouds of history show a rift and through it the sun of human betterment shines out for a few deceptive moments over a limited area.

he was doomed, like millions, to flee from wisdom and be a hero.

One of them was my father. He did not train aristocrats to govern the Empire or plutocrats to run their fathers' businesses, but he employed his wise and sweetening influence just as valuably among the thousands of elementary schoolboys who knew and know him still in a London suburb.

In 1933 Hilton was asked to write a 3,000 word short story for the magazine The British Weekly. After a week without inspiration he suddenly had an idea to write the story of the much-loved schoolmaster which he entitled Goodbye, Mr. Chip!

It fitted Baskul and Delhi and London, war making and empire building, consulates and trade concessions and dinner parties at Government House; there was a reek of dissolution over all that recollected world, and Barnard's cropper had only, perhaps, been better dramatized than his own. The whole game was doubtless going to pieces, but fortunately the players were not as a rule put on trial for the pieces they had failed to save. In that respect financiers were unlucky.