Hugh Kingsmill Quotations

Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.

A charlatan makes obscure what is clear; a thinker makes clear what is obscure.

A concern with the perfectibility of mankind is always a symptom of thwarted or perverted development.

The reward of renunciation is some good greater than the thing renounced. To renounce with no vision of such a good, from fear or in automatic obedience to a formula, is to weaken the springs of life, and to diminish the soul's resistance to this world.

Charity may cover a multitude of sins, but success transmutes them into virtues.

Bacon's not the only thing that's cured by hanging from a string.

The public mind [is] a cloudy region where only the simplest shapes are discerned with any accuracy.

Hamlet is every man's self-love with all its dreams realized. He wears all the crowns and carries every cross.

Hamlet is egotism as it appears to itself, and Don Quixote is egotism as it appears to the detached observer.

It is difficult to love mankind unless one has a reasonable private income, and when one has a reasonable private income one has better things to do than loving mankind.