Quotes from Ernest Dimnet

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

You can believe in God without believing in immortality, but it is hard to see how anyone can believe in immortality and not believe in God.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

A school is a place through which you have to pass before entering life, but where the teaching proper does not prepare you for life.

Life is a succession of lessons enforced by immediate reward, or, oftener, by immediate chastisement.

Do not read good books-life is too short for that-read only the best.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

Reading, to most people, means an ashamed way of killing time disguised under a dignified name

A book, like a landscape, is a state of consciousness varying with readers.

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it.

Mankind might be divided between multitude who hate to be kept waiting because they get bored and the happy few who rather like it because it gives them time for thought.

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

Prejudices subsist in people's imagination long after they have been destroyed by their experience.

All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.

Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room.

Touch the earth, love the earth, honour the earth, her plains, her valleys, her hills, and her seas; rest your spirit in her solitary places.

The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Ideas are the root of creation.

All serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.

Too often we forget that genius ... depends upon the data within its reach, that Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions.

Americans cannot realize how many chances for mental improvement they lose by their inveterate habit of keeping six conversations when there are twelve in the room.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

Education is the methodical creation of the habit of thinking.