Hugh Kingsmill Quotations

Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and no one is alive.

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

But bacon's not the only thing / That's cured by hanging from a string.

What still alive at twenty-two. / A clean, upstanding chap like you! / Sure, if your throat is hard to slit, / Slit your girl's and swing for it.

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.

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.

Ideas get substance and value not by being discussed but by being lived.

Behind the big names of twentieth-century literature there stands a shadow cabinet of writers waiting to take over once the Wind of Change has blown. My own vote goes to Hugh Kingsmill as leader of this opposition.

Most of the avoidable suffering in life springs from our attempts to escape the unavoidable suffering inherent in the fragmentary nature of our present existence. We expect immortal satisfactions from mortal conditions, and lasting and perfect happiness in the midst of universal change. To encourage this expectation, to persuade mankind that the ideal is realizable in this world, after a few preliminary changes in external conditions, is the distinguishing mark of all charlatans, whether in thought or action.

Friends are God's apology for relations.

There are dons who care for the intellect and the imagination, and there are priests who care for the spirit; but broadly speaking the function of universities and churches alike is to trim and tame enthusiasm, to suppress curiosity, and, in short, to whittle immortal souls into serviceable props of the established order.