Quotes by Norman Douglas

Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes. (Norman Douglas)

How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of ones senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality. (Norman Douglas)

If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things. (Norman Douglas)

It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest. (Norman Douglas)

Shall I give you my recipe for happiness? I find everything useful and nothing indispensable. I find everything wonderful and nothing miraculous. I reverence the body. I avoid first causes like the plague. (Norman Douglas)

The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying. (Norman Douglas)

There is in us a lyric germ or nucleus which deserves respect; it bids a man to ponder or create; and in this dim corner of himself he can take refuge and find consolations which the society of his fellow creatures does not provide. (Norman Douglas)

They who are all things to their neighbors cease to be anything to themselves. (Norman Douglas)

To find a friend one must close one eye - to keep him, two. (Norman Douglas)

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes. Take fifty of our current proverbial sayings-- they are so trite, so threadbare. None the less they embody the concentrated experience of the race, and the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot be far wrong. Has any man ever attained to inner harmony by pondering the experience of others? Not since the world began! He must pass through fire. (Norman Douglas)