Top 92 Lewes Quotes
#1. There was a shepherd the other day up at Findon Fair who had come from the east by Lewes with sheep, and who had in his eyes that reminiscence of horizons which makes the eyes of shepherds and of mountaineers different from the eyes of other men.
Hilaire Belloc
#3. It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.
George Henry Lewes
#5. Heart and Brain are the two lords of life. In the metaphors of ordinary speech and in the stricter language of science, we use these terms to indicate two central powers, from which all motives radiate, to which all influences converge.
George Henry Lewes
#7. Shakespeare is a good raft whereon to float securely down the stream of time; fasten yourself to that and your immortality is safe.
George Henry Lewes
#9. Books have become our dearest companions, yielding exquisite delights and inspiring lofty aims.
George Henry Lewes
#11. The delusions of self-love cannot be prevented, but intellectual misconceptions as to the means of achieving success may be corrected.
George Henry Lewes
#12. Literature delivers tidings of the world within and the world without.
George Henry Lewes
#13. Books minister to our knowledge, to our guidance, and to our delight, by their truth, their uprightness, and their art.
George Henry Lewes
#14. The art of writing is not, as many seem to imagine, the art of bringing fine phrases into rhythmical order, but the art of placing before the reader intelligible symbols of the thoughts and feelings in the writer's mind.
George Henry Lewes
#15. The intensity of vision in the artist and of vividness in his creations are the sole tests of his imaginative power.
George Henry Lewes
#16. Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality.
George Henry Lewes
#18. Those works alone can have enduring success which successfully appeal to what is permanent in human nature
which, while suiting the taste of the day, contain truths and beauty deeper than the opinions and tastes of the day.
George Henry Lewes
#20. The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.
George Henry Lewes
#21. Character is built out of circumstances. From exactly the same materials, one man builds palaces, while another builds hovels.
George Henry Lewes
#22. The opinion of the majority is not lightly to be rejected; but neither is it to be carelessly echoed.
George Henry Lewes
#23. The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".
George Henry Lewes
#24. He who is ignorant of Motion, says Aristotle , is necessarily ignorant of all natural things ... Not only was he entirely in the dark respecting the Laws, he was completely wrong in his conception of the nature of Motion ... He thought that every body in motion naturally tends to rest.
George Henry Lewes
#25. The separation of Science from Knowledge was effected step by step as the Subjective Method was replaced by the Objective Method: i.e., when in each inquiry the phenomena of external nature ceased to be interpreted on premisses suggested by the analogies of human nature.
George Henry Lewes
#26. Every one who has seriously investigated a novel question, who has really interrogated Nature with a view to a distinct answer, will bear me out in saying that it requires intense and sustained effort of imagination.
George Henry Lewes
#28. We are not judicious in love; we do not select those whom we ought to love, but those whom we cannot help loving.
George Henry Lewes
#29. We only see what interests us, and we have only insight in proportion to our sympathy.
G.H. Lewes
#30. In the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the earth we tread on, Life is every where. Nature lives: every pore is bursting with Life ; every death is only a new birth, every grave a cradle.
George Henry Lewes
#31. To love is for the Soul to choose a companion, and travel with it along the perilous defiles and winding ways of life; mutually sustaining, when it is rugged with obstructions, and mutually rejoicing, when rich broad plains and sunny slopes make journeying delight.
George Henry Lewes
#32. All bad Literature rests upon imperfect insight, or upon imitation, which may be defined as seeing at second-hand.
George Henry Lewes
#33. To some men popularity is always suspicious. Enjoying none themselves, they are prone to suspect the validity of those attainments which command it.
George Henry Lewes
#35. Originality is independence, not rebellion; it is sincerity, not antagonism.
George Henry Lewes
#36. Individual experiences being limited and individual spontaneity feeble, we are strengthened and enriched by assimilating the experience of others.
George Henry Lewes
#37. When a man fails to see the truth of certain generally accepted views, there is no law compelling him to provoke animosity by announcing his dissent.
George Henry Lewes
#38. I am suspicious without a motive, and jealous without love; although I feel I ought to love since I desire to be loved.
George Henry Lewes
#39. A man must be himself convinced if he is to convince others. The prophet must be his own disciple, or he will make none. Enthusiasm is contagious: belief creates belief.
George Henry Lewes
#40. The great desire of this age is for a doctrine which may serve to condense our knowledge, guide our researches, and shape our lives, so that conduct may really be the consequence of belief
George Henry Lewes
#41. Insincerity is always weakness; sincerity even in error is strength.
George Henry Lewes
#43. To write much, and to write rapidly, are empty boasts. The world desires to know what you have done, and not how you did it.
George Henry Lewes
#45. The magic of the pen lies in the concentration of your thoughts upon one object.
George Henry Lewes
#46. Whatever you believe to be true and false, that proclaim to be true and false; whatever you think admirable and beautiful, that should be your model, even if all your friends and all the critics storm at you as a crotchet-monger and an eccentric.
George Henry Lewes
#47. As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.
George Henry Lewes
#48. Sincerity is not only effective and honourable, it is also much less difficult than is commonly supposed.
George Henry Lewes
#49. To one man a stream is so much water-power, to another a rendezvous for lovers.
George Henry Lewes
#50. Ordinary men live among marvels and feel no wonder, grow familiar with objects and learn nothing new about them.
George Henry Lewes
#51. Literature is at once the cause and the effect of social progress.
George Henry Lewes
#52. Many a genius has been slow of growth. Oaks that flourish for a thousand years do not spring up into beauty like a reed.
George Henry Lewes
#53. The true function of philosophy is to educate us in the principles of reasoning and not to put an end to further reasoning by the introduction of fixed conclusions.
George Henry Lewes
#54. It will often be a question when a man is or is not wise in advancing unpalatable opinions, or in preaching heresies; but it can never be a question that a man should be silent if unprepared to speak the truth as he conceives it.
George Henry Lewes
#55. In all sincere speech there is power, not necessarily great power, but as much as the speaker is capable of.
George Henry Lewes
#56. It is not enough that a man has clearness of vision, and reliance on sincerity, he must also have the art of expression, or he will remain obscure.
George Henry Lewes
#57. The air is crowded with birds
beautiful, tender, intelligent birds
to whom life is a song.
George Henry Lewes
#60. Remember that every drop of rain that falls bears into the bosom of the earth a quality of beautiful fertility.
George Henry Lewes
#61. Not only the individual experience slowly acquired, but the accumulated experience of the race, organized in language, condensed in instruments and axioms, and in what may be called the inherited intuitions
these form the multiple unity which is expressed in the abstract term experience.
George Henry Lewes
#62. Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.
George Henry Lewes
#63. The spontaneous tendency to invoke a Final Cause in explanation of every difficulty is characteristic of metaphysical philosophy. It arises from a general tendency towards the impersonation of abstractions which is visible throughout History.
George Henry Lewes
#65. Over the meeting of the lovers I draw a veil. The burst of rapture with which they clasped each other in a wild embrace
the many inquiries
the fond regrets and thrilling hopes
it is out of my power to convey. Let me, therefore, leave them to their happiness.
George Henry Lewes
#67. The mathematician who is without value to mathematicians, the thinker who is obscure or meaningless to thinkers, the dramatist who fails to move the pit, may be wise, may be eminent, but as an author he has failed.
George Henry Lewes
#68. A man may be buoyed up by the efflation of his wild desires to brave any imaginable peril; but he cannot calmly see one he loves braving the same peril; simply because he cannot feel within turn that which prompts another. He sees the danger, and feels not the power that is to overcome it.
George Henry Lewes
#70. The real people of genius were resolute workers not idle dreamers.
George Henry Lewes
#71. There are many justifications of silence; there can be none of insincerity.
George Henry Lewes
#73. No man ever made a great discovery without the exercise of the imagination.
George Henry Lewes
#74. Pliny ... makes the statement, and for untrustworthiness of statement he cannot easily be surpassed.
George Henry Lewes
#75. If you feel yourself to be above the mass, speak so as to raise the mass to the height of your argument.
George Henry Lewes
#76. To his [ Plato's ] great disappointment, he found Anaxagoras adducing simple physical reasons, instead of the teleological reasons, which he had expected. Such a teacher could no longer allure him.
George Henry Lewes
#77. Philosophy and Art both render the invisible visible by imagination.
George Henry Lewes
#78. It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.
George Henry Lewes
#79. Whatever lies beyond the limits of experience, and claims another origin than that of induction and deduction from established data, is illegitimate.
George Henry Lewes
#80. The prosperity of a book lies in the minds of readers. Public knowledge and public taste fluctuate; and there come times when works which were once capable of instructing and delighting thousands lose their power, and works, before neglected, emerge into renown.
George Henry Lewes
#81. No man was ever eloquent by trying to be eloquent, but only by being so.
George Henry Lewes
#82. There are occasions when the simplest and fewest words surpass in effect all the wealth of rhetorical amplification.
George Henry Lewes
#83. In Science the paramount appeal is to the Intellect-its purpose being instruction; in Art, the paramount appeal is to the Emotions-its purpose being pleasure.
George Henry Lewes
#84. Endeavour to be faithful, and if there is any beauty in your thought, your style will be beautiful; if there is any real emotion to express, the expression will be moving.
George Henry Lewes
#86. Among the many strange servilities mistaken for pieties, one of the least lovely is that which hopes to flatter God by despising the world, and vilifying human nature.
George Henry Lewes
#88. No deeply rooted tendency was ever extirpated by adverse judgment. Not having originally been founded on argument, it cannot be destroyed by logic
George Henry Lewes
#89. If a work of art is placed before me, I believe I can enjoy it; but I do not overlook the fact, that Art is one thing, another thing Amusement; and that people do like amusements, and will run after it.
George Henry Lewes
#90. Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.
George Henry Lewes
#92. The superiority of one mind over another depends on the rapidity with which experiences are thus organised.
George Henry Lewes
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