W. L. George Quotes
The need of exercise is a modern superstition, invented by people who ate too much and had nothing to think about.
Is it indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between our nature and our environment, that we draw our conception of the divine life.
All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected man's natural sentiment in the face of death.
Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.
It is true that I am carrying out various methods of treatment recommended by doctors and dentists in the hope of dying in the remote future in perfect health.
Not to believe in love is a great sign of dullness. There are some people so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection rests on circumstantial evidence.
What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?
Nothing can be lower or more wholly instrumental than the substance and cause of all things.
Children are natural mythologists: they beg to be told tales, and love not only to invent but to enact falsehoods.
To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.
I leave you but the sound of many a word In mocking echoes haply overheard, I sang to heaven. My exile made me free, from world to world, from all worlds carried me.
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.
The vital straining towards an ideal, definite but latent, when it dominates a whole life, may express that ideal more fully than could the best chosen words.
Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come.
Nature in denying us perennial youth has at least invited us to become unselfish and noble.
Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.
A fanatical imagination cannot regard God as just unless he is represented as infinitely cruel.
Religion is indeed a convention which a man must be bred in to endure with any patience; and yet religion, for all its poetic motley, comes closer than work-a-day opinion to the heart of things.
Music contains a whole gamut of experience, from sensuous elements to ultimate intellectual harmonies.
Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?
The man who would emancipate art from discipline and reason is trying to elude rationality, not merely in art, but in all existence.
Art is the response to the demand for entertainment, for the stimulation of our senses and imagination, and truth enters into it only as it subserves these ends.
Popular poets are the parish priests of the Muse, retailing her ancient divinations to a long since converted public.
If clearness about things produces a fundamental despair, a fundamental despair in turn produces a remarkable clearness or even playfulness about ordinary matters.
With an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colour of a child's eyes.
Artists have no less talents than ever, their taste, their vision, their sentiment are often interesting; they are mighty in their independence and feeble only in their works.
The strongest feelings assigned to the conscience are not moral feelings at all; they express merely physical antipathies.
At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.
To be boosted by an illusion is not to live better than to live in harmony with the truth ... these refusals to part with a decayed illusion are really an infection to the mind.
The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral traditions may supply an organ and a point of comparison for his observations.
It is right to prefer our own country to all others, because we are children and citizens before we can be travellers or philosophers.
The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.
In the concert of nature it is hard to keep in tune with oneself if one is out of tune with everything else
Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.
Men almost universally have acknowledged providence, but that fact has had no force to destroy natural aversions and fears in the presence of events.
Religion should be disentangled as much as possible from history and authority and metaphysics, and made to rest honestly on one's fine feelings, on one's indomitable optimism and trust in life.
It is in rare and scattered instants that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced for habitual comfort to remembering her past favours.
What better comfort have we, or what other Profit in living Than to feed, sobered by the truth of Nature, Awhile upon her beauty, And hand her torch of gladness to the ages Following after?