Georges Duhamel Quotes

The book is one of the springs of creative individualism, that individualism which, in these uncertain times, remains the guardian angel of human society. For five hundred years the book has been, for the solitary mind, an incomparable instrument of uplift and liberation.

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

I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images.

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.

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

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

One of my friends whom I hold in high esteem admitted to me the other day that when he wants to work nowadays … he has to turn on his radio. The droning of the loudspeaker—so he says—puts him in a favorable frame of mind and ideas pour out. I cannot help but thinking that this is not the act of a true musician. For thought has a rhythm of its own, which must either clash with the rhythm from outside and lose energy, or else submit to the outer impulse in restless slavery.

Books are the friends of solitude. They develop individuality and freedom. In solitary reading a man who is seeking himself has some chance of finding himself.

Radio and cinema are daily playing a more and more important part, not only in the amusements of the twentieth-century man but also in the visible formation of his character.