Top 27 Robert Wilson Lynd Quotes
#1. When people complain of the decay of manners they have in mind not the impudent abbreviations of the crowd, but the decline in bowing and scraping and in speaking of one's employer as "the master." What the rich mean by the good manners of the poor is usually not civility, but servility.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#3. It is almost impossible to remember how tragic a place the world is when one is playing golf.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. We cannot get happiness by striving after it, and yet with an effort we can impart it.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#7. 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
#9. Most human beings are quite likeable if you do not see too much of them.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#10. No man is uninteresting when his hat is blown off and he has to scuttle after it down the street.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. Jane Austen has often been praised as a natural historian. She is a naturalist among tame animals. She does not study men (as Dostoevsky does) in his wild state before he has been domesticated. Her men and women are essentially men and women of the fireside.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Most human beings are quite likable if you don't see too much of them.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#25. This is woman's great benevolence, that she will become a martyr for beauty, so that the world may have pleasure.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#26. It is the custom when praising a Russian writer to do so at the expense of all other Russian writers.
Robert Wilson Lynd
#27. 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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