Robert Wilson Lynd Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“There is nothing in which the birds differ more from man than the way in which they can build and yet leave a landscape as it was before.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“A boy in love is not mainly a calf but a poet.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“No man is uninteresting when his hat is blown off and he has to scuttle after it down the street.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“Keats, it must be remembered, was a sensualist. His poems ... reveal him as a man not altogether free from the vulgarities of sensualism, as well as one who was able to transmute it into perfect literature.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
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“There are travelers who fear to own delicate hands more than to meet a lion, and soldiers who would rather lose a limb than gain a beautiful nose by artificial methods.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“Mr. Shaw came for a short time recently to be regarded less as an author than as an incident in the European War. In the opinion of many people it seemed as if the Allies were fighting against a combination composed of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Mr. Shaw.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“Mystery lies over the sea. Every ship is bound for Thule.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“The mirror that Strindberg held up to Nature was a cracked one. It was cracked in a double sense -- it was crazy. It gave back broken images of a world which it made look like the chaos of a lunatic dream.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
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“With Wordsworth, indeed, the light of revelation did not fall upon human beings so unbrokenly as upon the face of the earth. He knew the birds of the countryside better than the old men, and the flowers far better than the children.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“The lovers of beauty must unite in a league, and carry out some great propagandist work through the country. They must demand the extermination of the bulldog and the dismantling of the cheap villa, both of which are responsible for a deal of our contentment amid ugliness.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“Chekhov will seek out the key situation in the life of a cabman or a charwoman, and make them glow for a brief moment in the tender light of his sympathy.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“When one has praised Turgenev, however, for the beauty of his character and the beautiful truth of his art, one remembers that he, too, was human and therefore less than perfect. His chief failing was, perhaps, that of all the great artists, he was the most lacking in exuberance. That is why he began to be scorned in a world which rated exuberance higher than beauty or love or pity.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
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“Swinburne was an absurd character. He was a bird of showy strut and plumage. One could not but admire his glorious feathers; but, as soon as he began to moult ... one saw how very little body there was underneath.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“Dostoevsky's visible world was a world of sensationalism. He may in the last analysis be a great mystic or a great psychologist; but he almost always reveals his genius on a stage crowded with people who behave like the men and women one reads about in the police news.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“W. B. Yeats has created, if not a new world, a new star. He is not a reporter of life as it is, to the extent that Shakespeare or Browning is. One is not quite certain that his kingdom is of the green earth. He is like a man who has seen the earth not directly but in a crystal.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“We forget that Socrates was famed for wisdom not because he was omniscient but because he realized at the age of seventy that he still knew nothing.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
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“The happiness even of the naturalist depends in some measure upon his ignorance, which still leaves him new worlds of this kind to conquer. He may have reached the very Z of knowledge in the books, but he still feels half ignorant until he has confirmed each bright particular with his eyes.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“The last spectacle of which Christian men are likely to grow tired is a harbour. Centuries hence there may be jumping-off places for the stars, and our children's children's and so forth children may regard a ship as a creeping thing scarcely more adventurous than a worm. Meanwhile, every harbour gives us a sense of being in touch, if not with the ends of the universe, with the ends of the earth.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“There are two sorts of curiosity - the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
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“The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“Were I a philosopher, I should write a philosophy of toys, showing that nothing else in life need to be taken seriously, and that Christmas Day in the company of children is one of the few occasions on which men become entirely alive.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“The days on which one has been the most inquisitive are among the days on which one has been happiest.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“In order to see birds it is necessary to become a part of the silence.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
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“A cat is only technically an animal, being divine.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“It is doubtful if even experience of riches and success is as intense among those who have experienced nothing else as among those who have also experienced poverty and failure. There is little romance in wealth to those who have been born wealthy and whose families have been wealthy for generations.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“This is woman's great benevolence, that she will become a martyr for beauty, so that the world may have pleasure.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“We cannot get happiness by striving after it, and yet with an effort we can impart it.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
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“On the whole, however, the critic is far less of a professional faultfinder than is sometimes imagined. He is first of all a virtue-finder, a singer of praise. He is not concerned with getting rid of dross except in so far as it hides the gold. In other words, the destructive side of criticism is purely a subsidiary affair. None of the best critics have been men of destructive minds. They are like gardeners whose business is more with the flowers than with the weeds.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd -
“The art of writing history is the art of emphasizing the significant facts at the expense of the insignificant. And it is the same in every field of knowledge. Knowledge is power only if a man knows what facts not to bother about.”
-- Robert Wilson Lynd
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