Hugh Kingsmill Quotes

#1. The reward of renunciation is some good greater than the thing renounced. To renounce with no vision of such a good, from fear or in automatic obedience to a formula, is to weaken the springs of life, and to diminish the soul's resistance to this world.

Hugh Kingsmill

#2. Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

Hugh Kingsmill

#3. Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and no one is alive.

Hugh Kingsmill

#4. Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived.

Hugh Kingsmill

#5. Friends are God's apology for relations.

Hugh Kingsmill

#6. Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but success transmutes them into virtues.

Hugh Kingsmill

#7. The public mind [is] a cloudy region where only the simplest shapes are discerned with any accuracy.

Hugh Kingsmill

#8. Hamlet is every man's self-love with all its dreams realized. He wears all the crowns and carries every cross.

Hugh Kingsmill

#9. It is difficult to love mankind unless one has a reasonable private income, and when one has a reasonable private income one has better things to do than loving mankind.

Hugh Kingsmill

#10. Bacon's not the only thing that's cured by hanging from a string.

Hugh Kingsmill

#11. A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.

Hugh Kingsmill

#12. A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

Hugh Kingsmill

#13. Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.

Hugh Kingsmill

#14. Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of this opposition.

Hugh Kingsmill