Top 120 Ellen Glasgow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “All change is not growth, as all movement is not forward.”

— Ellen Glasgow

2. “There is no support so strong as the strength that enables one to stand alone.”

— Ellen Glasgow

Featured in: Strong Quotes

3. “Life is never what one dreams. It is seldom what one desires, but for the vital spirit and the eager mind, the future will always hold the search for buried treasure and the possibility of high adventure.”

— Ellen Glasgow

4. “What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.”

— Ellen Glasgow

5. “Nothing in life is so hard that you can’t make it easier by the way you take it.”

— Ellen Glasgow

6. “The only difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.”

— Ellen Glasgow

7. “What fools people are when they think they can make two lives belong together by saying words over them.”

— Ellen Glasgow

8. “Life may take away happiness. But it can’t take away having had it.”

— Ellen Glasgow

9. “Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.”

— Ellen Glasgow

10. “A tragic irony of life is that we so often achieve success or financial independence after the chief reason for which we sought it has passed away.”

— Ellen Glasgow

11. “It is only by knowing how little life has in store for us that we are able to look on the bright side and avoid disappointment.”

— Ellen Glasgow

12. “I’m not going to lie down and let trouble walk over me.”

— Ellen Glasgow

13. “It is lovely, when I forget all birthdays, including my own, to find that somebody remembers me.”

— Ellen Glasgow

14. “The hardest thing for me is the sense of impermanence. All passes; nothing returns.”

— Ellen Glasgow

15. “But, of course only morons would ever think or speak of themselves as intellectuals. That’s why they all look so sad.”

— Ellen Glasgow

16. “There is no monster more destructive than the inventive mind that has outstripped philosophy.”

— Ellen Glasgow

17. “Nothing is more consuming, or more illogical, than the desire for remembrance.”

— Ellen Glasgow

18. “Women like to sit down with trouble – as if it were knitting.”

— Ellen Glasgow

19. “The hardest thing to believe when you’re young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.”

— Ellen Glasgow

20. “She must face her grief where the struggle is always hardest-in the place where each trivial object is attended by pleasant memories.”

— Ellen Glasgow

21. “The government’s like a mule, it’s slow and it’s sure; it’s slow to turn, and it’s sure to turn the way you don’t want it.”

— Ellen Glasgow

22. “The older I grow the more earnestly I feel that the few joys of childhood are the best that life has to give.”

— Ellen Glasgow

23. “Preserve, within a wild sanctuary, an inaccessible valley of reverie.”

— Ellen Glasgow

24. “After a day of rain the sun came out suddenly at five o’clock and threw a golden bar into the deep Victorian gloom of the front parlour.”

— Ellen Glasgow

25. “There wouldn’t be half as much fun in the world if it weren’t for children and men, and there ain’t a mite of difference between them under the skins.”

— Ellen Glasgow

Featured in: Fun Quotes

26. “It was a perfect spring afternoon, and the air was filled with vague, roving scents, as if the earth exhaled the sweetness of hidden flowers.”

— Ellen Glasgow

27. “Nothingis so ungrateful as a rising generation; yet, if there is any faintest glimmer of light ahead of us in the present, itwas kindled by the intellectual fires that burned long before us.”

— Ellen Glasgow

28. “To seize the flying thought before it escapes us is our only touch with reality.”

— Ellen Glasgow

29. “He knows so little and knows it so fluently.”

— Ellen Glasgow

30. “The age is a vociferous one, and no prophet is without honor who is able to strike an attitude and to speak loud enough to make himself heard.”

— Ellen Glasgow

31. “The worst thing about war is that so many people enjoy it.”

— Ellen Glasgow

32. “I don’t like human nature, but I do like human beings.”

— Ellen Glasgow

33. “Mediocrity would always win by force of numbers, but it would win only more mediocrity.”

— Ellen Glasgow

34. “I liked human beings, but I did not love human nature.”

— Ellen Glasgow

35. “Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”

— Ellen Glasgow

36. “Passion alone could destroy passion. All the thinking in the world could not make so much as a dent in its surface.”

— Ellen Glasgow

37. “Spring was running in a thin green flame over the valley.”

— Ellen Glasgow

38. “Tilling the fertile soil of man’s vanity.”

— Ellen Glasgow

39. “A doctrine of endurance flows easily from our lips when we are enduring jam and our neighbors dry bread, and it is still possible for us to become resigned to the afflictions of our brother.”

— Ellen Glasgow

40. “No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.”

— Ellen Glasgow

41. “Why do all of us, every last one, have to go through hell to find out what we really want?’ The.”

— Ellen Glasgow

42. “It is human nature to overestimate the thing you’ve never had.”

— Ellen Glasgow

43. “There is only one force stronger than selfishness, and that is stupidity.”

— Ellen Glasgow

44. “The attraction of horror is a mental, or even an intellectual, excitement, but the fascination of the repulsive, so noticeable incontemporary writing, can spring openly from some rotted substance within our civilization...”

— Ellen Glasgow

45. “Too much principle is often more harmful than too little.”

— Ellen Glasgow

46. “True goodness is an inward grace, not an outward necessity.”

— Ellen Glasgow

47. “Moderation has never yet engineered an explosion.”

— Ellen Glasgow

48. “Experience has taught me that the only cruelties people condemn are those with which they do not happen to be familiar.”

— Ellen Glasgow

49. “After all, you can’t expect men not to judge by appearances.”

— Ellen Glasgow

50. “I had no place in any coterie, or in any reciprocal self-advertising. I stood alone. I stood outside. I wanted only to learn. I wanted only to write better.”

— Ellen Glasgow