Hugh MacLennan Quotes

#1. In comparison with a loving human being, everything else is worthless.

Hugh MacLennan

#2. People talk of calf-love with wistful disdain, but mine was as intense as any emotion I knew until I crossed the frontier, years later, when I discovered that all loving is a loving of life in the midst of death.

Hugh MacLennan

#3. Death suddenly seemed unimportant and life seemed everything

Hugh MacLennan

#4. Happiness annihilates time.

Hugh MacLennan

#5. He sat down again. He wanted her body, even though there were plenty of other bodies he could have. Which meant, I suppose, that he wanted her body to want his. It would have been beneath his intellectual dignity to admit that he also wanted her soul to like his own soul.

Hugh MacLennan

#6. Love, sought as an escape from the burden of the self, turns rapidly into a captivity.

Hugh MacLennan

#7. Marx is only half right when he calls religion the opium of the people. It may turn a lot of people into sheep, but it turns far too many of them into tigers.

Hugh MacLennan

#8. This campus was an island of quiet in the city's roar, and at night it was an island of dark in the city's blaze.

Hugh MacLennan

#9. Man is a thinking animal, a talking animal, a toolmaking animal, a building animal, a political animal, a fantasizing animal. But, in the twilight of a civilization he is chiefly a taxpaying animal.

Hugh MacLennan

#10. The Socialists can scheme their schemes and the Liberals can dream their dreams, but we, at least, have work to do.

Hugh MacLennan

#11. The farmer's way of saving money: to be owed by someone he trusted.

Hugh MacLennan

#12. The Greeks, who knew everything, understood that without the orgy there is no middle ground between bedlam and Toronto ... we need the healing grace of the orgy in this country.

Hugh MacLennan

#13. Wise Penelope! That's was Odysseus said to his wife when he got home. I don't think he ever told her he loved her. He probably knew the words would sound too small.

Hugh MacLennan

#14. ....we have discovered a great social secret in Canada. We have contrived to solve problems which would ruin other countries merely by ignoring their existence.

Hugh MacLennan