Georges Duhamel Quotes

Scènes de la vie future (1930), p. 52

Aristocracy of the mind … is the only true aristocracy in my opinion. It is the essence, the very life of a well-built society.

… a pastime for helots, a diversion for uneducated, wretched, worn-out creatures who are consumed by their worries, … a spectacle which requires no concentration and presupposes no intelligence,… which kindles no light in the heart and awakens no hope other than the ridiculous one of someday becoming a ‘star’ in Los Angeles.

Radio, on the other hand, is now the chief agent of imperialism. It does not purify the spirit of man, does not, like the book, bring him back to the sanctuary of solitude, but throws him to the lions, subtly preparing his mind for the blood and chains of public sacrifice.

For many people in the future, radio will take the place of an inner life.

Use your radio, but know how to distrust it—and do not let a day go by without reading and meditation if you want to save your soul, that soul which is yours and yours alone.

It is an extraordinary thing that this civilization, which wears out our nerves and exacts an almost painful effort from us in all our doings, should be at great pains to spare the mass of people that intellectual effort which is the only measure of true culture.

If humanity were to lose its libraries, not only would it be deprived of certain treasures of art, certain spiritual riches, but, more important still, it would lose its recipes for living.

If the public gets out of the habit of reading they will not come back to it. We shall enter a new phase of our history from which there is no turning back.

A book exhales a subtle odor of spirituality throughout the place it adorns.

In books may be found the recipes for manufacture of a steam-engine alongside the recipes for daily living—the prescriptions for the mind and the heart.

The instinct to synthesize is a good one so long as it is concerned with elements that are capable of forming a whole. But today the man in the street is fed, morally as well as physically, on a mass of debris which has no resemblance to a nourishing diet. There is no method in this madness, which is the very negation of culture.

What a teacher imparts by word of mouth is nothing in comparison with what he teaches us to get for ourselves from books.

Is it possible to create a maintain a true culture, a strong and flourishing culture, through the medium of pictoral and oral apparatus?

Just as we say “listening and hearing,” “looking and seeing,” so we ought to have two expressions to distinguish active reading from passive.