Walter Bagehot > Quotes

“The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”
― Walter Bagehot

“Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.”
― Walter Bagehot

“The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything. ”
― Walter Bagehot

“It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.”
― Walter Bagehot

“The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”
― Walter Bagehot

“We see but one aspect of our neighbor, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half, which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.”
― Walter Bagehot

“Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.”
― Walter Bagehot

“The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.”
― Walter Bagehot

“The habit of common and continuous speech is a symptom of mental deficiency.”
― Walter Bagehot

“You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor... Public opinion is a permeating influence, and it exacts obedience to itself; it requires us to think other men's thoughts, to speak other men's words, to follow other men's habits.”
― Walter Bagehot, Biographical Studies

“Life is a school of probability.”
― Walter Bagehot

“Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.”
― Walter Bagehot

“The soldier—that is, the great soldier—of to-day is not a romantic animal, dashing at forlorn hopes, animated by frantic sentiment, full of fancies as to a love-lady or a sovereign; but a quiet, grave man, busied in charts, exact in sums, master of the art of tactics, occupied in trivial detail; thinking, as the Duke of Wellington was said to do, most of the shoes of his soldiers; despising all manner of èclat and eloquence; perhaps, like Count Moltke, ‘silent in seven languages’.”
― Walter Bagehot

“Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.”
― Walter Bagehot

“it is the continual effort of the beginning that creates the hoarded energy of the end;”
― Walter Bagehot, Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of natural selection and inheritance to political society

“The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do”
― Walter Bagehot

“Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with mean mind”
― Walter Bagehot

“The abstract thinking of the world is never to be expected of persons in high places...”
― Walter Bagehot

“The splitting of sovereignty into many parts amounts to there being no sovereign.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“Custom is the first check on tyranny; that fixed routine of social life at which modern innovations chafe, and by which modern improvement is impeded, is the primitive check on base power.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“[A]n ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“The greatest please in life is doing what people say you cannot do.”
― Walter Bagehot

“The greatest plesure in life is doing what people say you cannot do”
― Walter Bagehot

“The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers. According to the traditional theory, as it exists in all the books, the goodness of our constitution consists in the entire separation of the legislative and executive authorities, but in truth its merit consists in their singular approximation. The connecting link is the cabinet.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“The most hopeless idleness is that most smoothed with excellent plans.”
― Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution

“El mejor placer en la vida es hacer lo que la gente te dice que no puedes hacer.”
― Walter Bagehot

“History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.”
― Walter Bagehot

“In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.”
― Walter Bagehot

“Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous with a mean mind.”
― Walter Bagehot

“Unproved abstract principles without number have been eagerly caught up by sanguine men, and then carefully spun out into books and theories, which were to explain the whole world. But the world goes clear against these abstractions, and it must do
so, as they require it to go in antagonistic directions. The mass of a system attracts the young and impresses the unwary; but cultivated people are very dubious about it.
They are ready to receive hints and suggestions, and the smallest real truth is ever welcome. But a large book of deductive philosophy is much to be suspected. Who is not almost sure beforehand that the premises will contain a strange mixture of truth and error, and therefore that it will not be worth while to spend life in reasoning over their consequences?”
― Walter Bagehot, Physics And Politics