Top 40 Norman Douglas Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Has any man ever obtained inner harmony by simply reading about the experiences of others? Not since the world began has it ever happened. Each man must go through the fire himself.”

— Norman Douglas

Featured in: Reading Quotes

2. “You can tell the ideals of a nation by its advertisements.”

— Norman Douglas

3. “The secret of happiness is curiosity.”

— Norman Douglas

4. “Why always “not yet”? Do flowers in spring say “not yet”?”

— Norman Douglas

5. “Distrust of authority should be the first civic duty.”

— Norman Douglas

6. “The true cook is the perfect blend, the only perfect blend, of artist and philosopher. He knows his worth: he holds in his palm the happiness of mankind, the welfare of generations yet unborn.”

— Norman Douglas

7. “How hard it is, sometimes, to trust the evidence of one’s senses! How reluctantly the mind consents to reality.”

— Norman Douglas

8. “One can always trust to time. Insert a wedge of time and nearly everything straightens itself out.”

— Norman Douglas

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

— Norman Douglas

10. “It takes a wise man to handle a lie, a fool had better remain honest.”

— Norman Douglas

11. “A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother.”

— Norman Douglas

12. “Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.”

— Norman Douglas

13. “Justice is too good for some people and not good enough for the rest.”

— Norman Douglas

14. “The business of life is to enjoy oneself; everything else is a mockery.”

— Norman Douglas

15. “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.”

— Norman Douglas

16. “It seldom pays to be rude. It never pays to be only half-rude.”

— Norman Douglas

17. “The families of our friends are always a disappointment.”

— Norman Douglas

18. “He talks about the Scylla of Atheism and the Charybdis of Christianity – a state of mind which, by the way, is not conducive to bold navigation.”

— Norman Douglas

19. “Learn to foster an ardent imagination; so shall you descry beauty which others passed unheeded.”

— Norman Douglas

20. “Never take a solemn oath. People think you mean it.”

— Norman Douglas

21. “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

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

— Norman Douglas

23. “You can cram a truth into an epigram – the truth, never.”

— Norman Douglas

24. “The sublimity of wisdom is to do those things living, which are to be desired when dying.”

— Norman Douglas

25. “There is a kinship, a kind of freemasonry, between all persons of intelligence, however antagonistic their moral outlook.”

— Norman Douglas

26. “How often could things be remedied by a word. How often is it left unspoken.”

— Norman Douglas

27. “Wine is a precarious aphrodisiac, and its fumes have blighted many a mating.”

— Norman Douglas

28. “I wish the English still possessed a shred of the old sense of humour which Puritanism, and dyspepsia, and newspaper reading, and tea-drinking have nearly extinguished.”

— Norman Douglas

Featured in: Reading Quotes

29. “Many a man who thinks to found a home discovers that he has merely opened a tavern for his friends.”

— Norman Douglas

30. “Mr. Frederick Parker spent a good deal of his time in endeavouring to mask, under a cloak of boisterous good humour, a really remarkable combination of malevolence and imbecility.”

— Norman Douglas

31. “A man can believe a considerable deal of rubbish, and yet go about his daily work in a rational and cheerful manner.”

— Norman Douglas

32. “The older I get,” observed Mr. van Koppen, “the more I realize that everything depends upon what a man postulates. The rest is plain sailing.”

— Norman Douglas

33. “They who are all things to their neighbors cease to be anything to themselves.”

— Norman Douglas

34. “Bouillabaisse is only good because cooked by the French, who, if they cared to try, could produce an excellent and nutritious substitute out of cigar stumps and empty matchboxes.”

— Norman Douglas

35. “There is so much goodness in real life- do let us keep it out of our books.”

— Norman Douglas

36. “I can find no room in my cosmos for a deity save as a waste product of human weakness, the excrement of the imagination.”

— Norman Douglas

37. “No one can expect a majority to be stirred by motives other than ignoble.”

— Norman Douglas

38. “The longer one lives, the more one realizes that nothing is a dish for every day.”

— Norman Douglas

39. “No great man is ever born too soon or too late.”

— Norman Douglas

40. “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

41. “It is one of the maladies of our age to profess a frenzied allegiance to truth in unimportant matters, to refuse consistently to face her where graver issues are at stake.”

— Norman Douglas

42. “People who have reformed themselves has contributed their full share towards the reformation of their neighbor.”

— Norman Douglas

43. “The present age, for all its cosmopolitan hustle, is curiously suburban in spirit.”

— Norman Douglas

44. “The law does not content itself with classifying and punishing crime. It invents crime.”

— Norman Douglas

45. “Everybody overstates his case, particularly when he is anxious to do something which he considers useful.”

— Norman Douglas