Norman Douglas (1868-1952)

Quotes

• You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.

• If you want to see what children can do, you must stop giving them things.

• What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.

• How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one's senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.

• 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.

• You can construct the character of a man and his age not only from what he does and says, but from what he fails to say and do.

• 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.

• Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.