Quotes from Norman Douglas

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.

To find a friend one must close one eye; To keep him, two

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.

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

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.

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

How reluctantly the mind consents to reality!

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

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

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes?

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.

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

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

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

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes. Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings-- they are so trite, so threadbare. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot be far wrong. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through fire.

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

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