Walter Bagehot Quotes

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

The greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Men who do not make advances to women are apt to become victims to women who make advances to them.

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.

Life is a school of probability.

The greatest mistake is trying to be more agreeable than you can be.

The real essence of work is concentrated energy.

Woman absent is woman dead.

The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights -- the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.

He believes, with all his heart and soul and strength, that there is such a thing as truth; he has the soul of a martyr with the intellect of an advocate.

The beginning of civilization is marked by an intense legality; that legality is the very condition of its existence, the bond which ties it together; but that legality - that tendency to impose a settled customary yoke upon all men and all actions -.

Life is not a set campaign, but an irregular work, and the main forces in it are not overt resolutions, but latent and half-involuntary promptings.

Open-mindedness should not be fostered because, as Scripture teaches, Truth is great and will prevail, nor because, as Milton suggests, Truth will always win in a free and open encounter. It should be fostered for its own sake.

Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.

History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

Money is economic power.

War both needs and generates certain virtues; not the highest, but what may be called the preliminary virtues, as valor, veracity, the spirit of obedience, the habit of discipline. Any of these, and of others like them, when possessed by a nation, and no matter how generated, will give them a military advantage, and make them more likely to stay in the race of nations.

The reason that there are so few good books written is that so few people who write know anything.

The reason why so few good books are written is that so few people who can write know anything.

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.

We must not let daylight in upon the magic.

What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.