Ernest Dimnet Quotes

Every day you waste a chance, many chances in fact, of getting at your innermost consciousness by expressing yourself as you see yourself, and I say it is a pity because it makes you, year after year and day after day more like anybody else and more anonymous.

All men saved from the scattering influences of society by a powerful incentive, a cause, or an ideal of individual perfection, seldom fear the danger of being distracted by comers and goers.

The more a man thinks the better adapted he becomes to thinking, and education is nothing if it is not the methodical creation of the habit of thinking. Precisely. Theoretically, education is a mental training aiming at greater intellectual elasticity, but the question is whether education does not often strain, instead of train, a mind.

Very busy people always find time for everything. Conversely, people with immense leisure find time for nothing.

We all more or less consciously note this. We cannot help observing that all serious conversations gravitate towards philosophy.

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

Children have to be educated, but they have also to be left to educate themselves.

The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Ideas are the root of creation.

Too often we forget that genius, too, depends upon the data within its reach, that even Archimedes could not have devised Edison's inventions. We also forget that genius is not genius all the time, although it is superior all the time.

Self-expression is individuality, and our individuality is our self, which ought to be our chief concern

Most people suspend their judgment till somebody else has expressed his own and then they repeat it. Common parlance alludes to this weakness in the frequently heard phrase: PEOPLE DO NOT THINK.

Personality is the knowledge that we are apart from the rest of the universe.

Social intercourse, with its … hypocrisy … is highly productive of thought-hindering insincerity.

Where the writer produces that combination of perfect technique, human interest, and thruth, and can add to it that supreme touch, the perfection of art has been attained.