Philip Gilbert Hamerton Quotes

We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest.

The only hope of preserving what is best, lies in the practice of an immense charity, a wide tolerance, a sincere respect for opinions that are not ours.

Never be afraid of What is good; the good is always the road to what is true.

Culture is like wealth; it makes us more ourselves, it enables us to express ourselves

In learning to know other things, and other minds, we become more intimately acquainted with ourselves, and are to ourselves better worth knowing.

The art of reading is to skip judiciously. Whole libraries may be skipped in these days, when we have the results of them in our modern culture without going over the ground again.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.

Fashion is nothing more than the temporary custom of rich and idle people who make it their principal business to study the external elegance of life.

As there is no pleasure in military life for a soldier who fears death, so there is no independence in civil existence for the man who has an overpowering dread of solitude.

People have prejudices against a nation in which they have no acquaintances.

Woe unto him that is never alone, and cannot bear to be alone.

The one mistake which is committed habitually by people who have the gift of half-genius, is waiting for inspiration.

There are natures that go to the streams of life in great cities as the hart goes to the water brooks.

Society is, and must be, based upon appearances, and not upon the deepest appearances, and not realities.

Conversation is interesting in proportion to the originality of the central ideas which serve as pivots and the fitness of the little facts and observations which are contributed by the talkers.

You may have a cat in the room with you without anxiety about anything except eatables. The presence of a cat is positively soothing to a student.

The opinions of men who think are always growing and changing, like living children.

I wonder how it is that so cheerful-looking a tree as the willow should ever have become associated with ideas of sadness.

Avowed work, even when uncongenial, is far less trying to patience than feigned pleasure.

Unless a man works he cannot find out what he is able to do.

Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention.