William Hurrell Mallock > Quotes

“And with distance in time it is the same as with distance in place. The imagination has its atmosphere and its sunlight as well as the earth has; only its mists are even more gorgeous and delicate, its aerial perspectives are even more wide and profound. It also transifgures and beautifies things in far more various ways. For the imagination is all senses in one; it is sight, it is smell, it is hearing; it is memory, regret, and passion. Everything goes to nourish it, from first love to literature - literature, which, for cultivated people, is the imagination's gastric juice.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, In An Enchanted Island: Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus

“Some will be always strong, and some will be always weak; and though, if there is no God, no divine and fatherly source of order, there will be, trust me, no aristocracies, there will still be tyrannies. There will still be rich and poor; and that will then mean happy and miserable; and the poor will be--as I sometimes think they are already--but a mass of groaning machinery, without even the semblance of rationality; and the rich, with only the semblance of it, but a set of gaudy, dancing marionettes, which is the machinery’s one work to keep in motion.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, The New Republic: Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House

“But will you be able to say what is right and what is wrong any longer, if you don’t know for whom anything is right and for whom anything is wrong--whether it is for men with immortal souls, or only with mortal bodies--who are only a little lower than the angels, or only a little better than the pigs? Whilst you can still contrive to doubt upon this matter, whilst the fabric of the old faith is still dissolving only, life still for you, the enlightened few, may preserve what happiness it has now. But when the old fabric is all dissolved, what then? When all divinity shall have gone from love and heroism, and only utility and pleasure shall be left, what then?”
― William Hurrell Mallock, The New Republic: Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House

“To me,' said Mr. Herbert, 'it seems rather that the only hope for the present age lies in the possibility of some individual wiser than the rest getting the necessary power, and in the most arbitrary way possible putting a stop to this progress--utterly stamping out and obliterating every general tendency peculiar to our own time.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, The New Republic: Culture, Faith, and Philosophy in an English Country House

“The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one another.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, In an Enchanted Island Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus

“Landscapes, even when their general type is similar, are capable of as many expressions as the same type of human face, and, without our being able fully to tell why, affect our spirits as we look at them with as many moods and meanings.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, In An Enchanted Island: Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus

“The emptiness of the things of this life, the incompleteness of even its highest pleasures, and their utter powerlessness to make us really happy, has been, at least for fifteen hundred years, a commonplace, both with saints and sages.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, Is Life Worth Living?

“Most of man's finest heroism is merely disguised necessity.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, In An Enchanted Island: Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus

“Just as a consummate cook will prepare a most delicate repast out of the most poor materials, so will the modern poet concoct us a most popular poem from the weakest emotions, and the most tiresome platitudes. The only difference is, that the cook would prefer good materials if he could get them, whilst the modern poet will take the bad from choice.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, Every Man His Own Poet Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book

“Civilisation is never so charming as when it is an island in the middle of simplicity, or of a civilisation of an alien kind.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, In An Enchanted Island: Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus

“Literature, I have always thought, is in most places and companies a singularly dull and uninteresting thing to talk about, but one may, as a rule, hate literary conversation, and yet at the right moment, with all its powers of feeling, the mind in silence may feel what it owes to literature.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, In an Enchanted Island Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus

“And surely, whatever, in this its course of change, poetry may have lost in quality, is more than made up for by what it has gained in quantity. For in the first place it is far pleasanter to the tastes of a scientific generation, to understand how to make bad poetry than to wonder at good; and secondly, as the end of poetry is pleasure, that we should make it each for ourselves is the very utmost that we can desire, since it is a fact in which we all agree, that no man's verses please him so much as his own.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, Every Man His Own Poet: Or The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book

“Poetry as practised by the latest masters, is the art of expressing what is too foolish, too profane, or too indecent to be expressed in any other way.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, Every Man His Own Poet Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book

“A change was coming over the world, the meaning and direction of which even still is hidden from us, a change from era to era.—Froude's History of England, ch. i.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, Is Life Worth Living?

“If a man wishes to ensure the bad opinion of others, his best course probably is to be honest about himself.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, In An Enchanted Island: Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus

“Students at the University now lose a class for not being familiar with opinions, which but twenty years ago they would have been expelled for dreaming of.”
― William Hurrell Mallock, Every Man His Own Poet Or, The Inspired Singer's Recipe Book

“Was my guide a person who would expect what is vulgary called a "tip"? Or was his position so high that even to offer it would be an insult?”
― William Hurrell Mallock, In An Enchanted Island: Or A Winter's Retreat In Cyprus