Top 50 Hope Mirrlees Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A house with old furniture has no need of ghosts to be haunted.”

— Hope Mirrlees

2. “Why is Melancholy like Honey? Because it is very sweet, and it is culled from Flowers.”

— Hope Mirrlees

3. “Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never permanent. But, like the juice of the poppy, it often gives a temporary relief.”

— Hope Mirrlees

4. “You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwittingly giving you for a portrait – a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished.”

— Hope Mirrlees

5. “And the man who remains calm inevitably takes command of a situation.”

— Hope Mirrlees

6. “The law plays fast and loose with reality- and no one really believes it.”

— Hope Mirrlees

7. “At last they settled down to their long watch – squatting round the fire, and laughing for sheer love of adventure as good campaigners should; for were there not marching towards them some eight dark hours equipped with who could say what curious weapons from the rich arsenal of night and day?”

— Hope Mirrlees

8. “His own way to a sick man is what grass is to a sick dog.”

— Hope Mirrlees

9. “The round towers of the castles looked as if they were so firmly encrusted in the sky that, to get to their other side, one would have to hew out a passage through the celestial marble.”

— Hope Mirrlees

10. “There’s no more foolish proverb than the one which says that dead men tell no tales. To help dead men to find their tongues is one of the chief uses of the Law.”

— Hope Mirrlees

11. “Let mental suffering be intense enough, and it becomes a sort of carminative.”

— Hope Mirrlees

12. “A class struggling to assert itself, to discover its true shape, which lies hidden, as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself, be different from the same class when chisel and mallet have been laid aside, and it has actually become what it had so long been struggling to be.”

— Hope Mirrlees

13. “Besides, there was that foolish feeling of his that reality was not solid, and that facts were only plastic toys; or, rather, that they were poisonous plants, which you need not pluck unless you choose. And, even if you do pluck them, you can always fling them from you and leave them to wither on the ground. He.”

— Hope Mirrlees

14. “All the world over we are very conscious of the trees in spring, and watch with delight how the network of twigs on the wych-elms is becoming spangled with tiny puce flowers, like little beetles caught in a spider’s web, and how little lemon-colored buds are studding the thorn. While as to the long red-gold buds of the horse-chestnuts – they come bursting out with a sort of a visual bang. And now the beech is hatching its tiny perfectly-formed leaves.”

— Hope Mirrlees

15. “He says to me, Ranulph, he says... that the past will never come again, but that we must remember that the past is made of the present, and that the present is always here.”

— Hope Mirrlees

16. “A bad conscience makes a very good ghost.”

— Hope Mirrlees

17. “So fine a medicine is the will to action.”

— Hope Mirrlees

18. “And there were ruined castles covered with ivy – the badge of the old order, clinging to its own; and into the ivy doves dived, seeming to leave in their wake a trail of amethyst, just as a clump of bottle-green leaves is shot with purple by the knowledge that it hides violets.”

— Hope Mirrlees

19. “You are, so to speak, a bad sailor, and the motion of life makes you brain-sick.”

— Hope Mirrlees

20. “A relationship that has become artificial, and connected, on one side, with a sense of duty rather than with spontaneous affection, is always an uncomfortable one.”

— Hope Mirrlees

21. “For he realized at last that the spiritual balm he had always found in silent things was simply the assurance that the passions and agonies of man were without meaning, roots, or duration – no more part of the permament background of the world than the curls of blue smoke that from time to time were wafted through the valley from the autumn bonfires of weeds and rubbish, and that he could see winding like blue wraiths in and out of the foilage of the trees.”

— Hope Mirrlees

22. “Mad folks are often as dangerous as bad ones.”

— Hope Mirrlees

23. “There is not a single homely thing that, looked at from a certain angle, does not become fairy.”

— Hope Mirrlees

24. “And then the disquieting thought would come to him that perhaps after all epitaphs are not altogether to be trusted.”

— Hope Mirrlees

25. “Reason is only a drug, and its effects cannot be permanent.”

— Hope Mirrlees

26. “The narrow zone of color created by the firelight was like the planet Earth – a little freak of brightness in a universe of impenetrable shadows.”

— Hope Mirrlees

27. “He sprang to his feet, and cried roughly, ‘I’ll give you a handful of Yeses and Noes, Jessamine, and it’ll keep you amused for the rest of the evening sorting them out, and sticking them on to your questions. I’m going out.”

— Hope Mirrlees

28. “Sentimentality is a quality that rarely has the slightest influence on action.”

— Hope Mirrlees

29. “Then the trees, after their long silence, began to talk again, in yellow and red.”

— Hope Mirrlees

30. “Fairyland is the place where what we look upon as symbols and figures actually exist and occur.”

— Hope Mirrlees

31. “And it was in sheer self-defence that they obeyed – as if by dancing they somehow or other escaped from that tune, which seemed to be themselves.”

— Hope Mirrlees

32. “Poor old moon!” chuckled master Nathaniel, who was now in the highest of spirits, “always filching colours with which to paint her own pale face, and all in vain!”

— Hope Mirrlees

33. “We have the misfortune of living in a country that marches with the unknown; and that is apt to make the fancy sick. Though we laugh at old songs and old yarns, nevertheless, they are the yarn with which we weave our picture of the world.”

— Hope Mirrlees

34. “It was as if he thought he had already lost what he was actually holding in his hands.”

— Hope Mirrlees

35. “He could not stand people saying, “Who knows what we shall be doing this time next year?” and he loathed such expressions as “for the last time,” “never again”...”

— Hope Mirrlees

36. “But the other tribe – the passionate, tragic, rootless tree – man? Alas! He is a creature whose highest privileges are a curse. In his mouth is ever the bitter-sweet taste of life and death, unknown to the trees. Without respite he is dragged by the two wild horses, memory and hope; and he is tormented by a secret that he can never tell. For every man worthy of the name is an initiate; but each one into different Mysteries.”

— Hope Mirrlees

37. “To the imaginative, it is always something of an adventure to walk down a pleached alley. You enter boldly enough, but soon you find yourself wishing you had stayed outside – it is not air that you are breathing, but silence, the almost palpable silence of trees.”

— Hope Mirrlees

38. “But, after these days of nightmare, there was something reassuring in discovering that there were still people in the world sane enough, and with quiet enough minds, to be put out by the holes in a pair of worsted stockings.”

— Hope Mirrlees

39. “It shocked his sense of dramatic economy that they should have to resort to violence when the same result could have been obtained by a minimum expenditure of energy.”

— Hope Mirrlees

40. “And he would gaze in terror at his furniture, his walls, his pictures – what strange scene might they one day witness, what awful experience might he one day have in their presence?”

— Hope Mirrlees

41. “Beauty doesn’t keep, but rots like apples.”

— Hope Mirrlees

42. “With each word her voice rose higher, like a soaring bird. But at the last word it was as if the bird when it had reached the ceiling suddenly fell down dead.”

— Hope Mirrlees

43. “It was in the spring of his fiftieth year that Master Nathaniel Chanticleer had his first real anxiety.”

— Hope Mirrlees

44. “Their long, meandering tales of humble normal lives were like the proverbial glimpse of a snug, lamp-lit parlour to a traveller belated after nightfall.”

— Hope Mirrlees

45. “When, on his return to Lud-in-the-Mist, he had been twitted for having wasted so much time on such an unworthy object, he had answered that a pig was thrall to the same master as a Mayor, and that it needed as much skill to cure the one as the other; adding that a good fiddler enjoys fiddling for its own sake, and that it is all the same to him whether he plays at a yokel’s wedding or a merchant’s funeral.”

— Hope Mirrlees

46. “The Academy represented to the ladies of Lud all that they knew of romance. They remembered the jokes they had laughed at within its walls, the secrets they had exchanged walking up and down its pleached alleys, far more vividly than anything that had afterwards happened to them.”

— Hope Mirrlees

47. “And Master Nathaniel’s pleached alley was growing yellower and yellower, and on the days when a thick white mist came rolling up from the Dapple it would be the only object in his garden that was not blurred and dimmed, and would look like a pair of gigantic golden compasses with which a demiurge is measuring chaos.”

— Hope Mirrlees

48. “And the sun would set, and then our riders could watch the actual process of colour fading from the world. Was that tree still really green, or was it only that they were remembering how a few seconds ago it had been green?”

— Hope Mirrlees

49. “Reality was beginning to become very shadowy and menacing.”

— Hope Mirrlees

50. “Such, then, were the men in whose hands lay the welfare of the country. And, it must be confessed, they knew but little and cared still less about the common people for whom they legislated.”

— Hope Mirrlees