Walter Bagehot famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Mean #Mind #Virtuous
A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Inspirational #Funny #Life
It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Men #Imagination #Weakness
A schoolmaster should have an atmosphere of awe, and walk wonderingly, as if he was amazed at being himself.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Teacher #Fear #Diversity
One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Pain #Ideas #Human Nature
Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Writing #Teeth
The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Real #Independent #Essence
An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Music #Communication #Silence
Business is really more agreeable than pleasure; it interests the whole mind, the aggregate nature of man more continuously, and more deeply. But it does not look as if it did.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Business #Men #Mind
The real essence of work is concentrated energy.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Real #Essence #Energy
What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Men #Mind #Results
The cardinal maxim is, that any aid to a present bad Bank is the surest mode of preventing the establishment of a future good Bank.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Aids #Establishment #Cardinals
No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Long #Meditation #Calming
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards
-- Walter Bagehot

#Civilization #Firsts #Culture
Women--one half the human race at least--care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Marriage #Race #Half
In the faculty of writing nonsense, stupidity is no match for genius.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Book #Writing #Stupidity
All people are most credulous when they are most happy.
-- Walter Bagehot

#People
The best security for people's doing their duty is that they should not know anything else to do.
-- Walter Bagehot

#People #Should #Duty
There seems to be an unalterable contradiction between the human mind and its employments. How can a soul be a merchant? What relation to an immortal being have the price of linseed, the brokerage on hemp? Can an undying creature debit petty expenses and charge for carriage paid? The soul ties its shoes; the mind washes its hands in a basin. All is incongruous.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Hands #Shoes #Ties
One cannot make men good by Act of Parliament.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Men #Parliament
But of all nations in the world the English are perhaps the least a nation of pure philosophers.
-- Walter Bagehot

#World #Philosopher
It has been said that England invented the phrase, 'Her Majesty's Opposition'.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Majesty #England #Phrases
Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Life #Stars #Caring
Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Wise #Lying #Philosophy
The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.
-- Walter Bagehot

#Book #Writing #Eye

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