Leslie Stephen quotes

If you wish at once to do nothing and to be respectable now-a-days, the best pretext is to be at work on some profound study. (Leslie Stephen)

He who sees only what is before his eyes sees the worst part of every view.

Leslie Stephen

The division between faith and reason is a half-measure, till it is frankly admitted that faith has to do with fiction, and reason with fact.

Leslie Stephen

The poet should touch our heart by showing his own.

Leslie Stephen

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.

Leslie Stephen

Why, when no honest man will deny in private that every ultimate problem is wrapped in the profoundest mystery, do honest men proclaim in pulpits that unhesitating certainty is the duty of the most foolish and ignorant? Is it not a spectacle to make the angels laugh?

Leslie Stephen

Poe is a kind of Hawthorne and delirium tremens.

Leslie Stephen

Philistine – a word which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the name applied by prigs to the rest of their species.

Leslie Stephen

The doctrine of toleration requires a positive as well as a negative statement. It is not only wrong to burn a man on account of his creed, but it is right to encourage the open avowal and defence of every opinion sincerely maintained. Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

Leslie Stephen

The truth cannot be asserted without denouncing the falsehood.

Leslie Stephen

Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is doing a public service. (Leslie Stephen)

Chance is a name for our ignorance.

Leslie Stephen

If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt.

Leslie Stephen

If atheism is to be used to express the state of mind in which God is identified with the unknowable, and theology is pronounced to be a collection of meaningless words about unintelligible chimeras, then I have no doubt, and I think few people doubt, that atheists are as plentiful as blackberries.

Leslie Stephen

A good talker, even more than a good orator, implies a good audience. Modern society is too vast and too restless to give a conversationalist a fair chance.

Leslie Stephen

Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season. All great men of letters have therefore been enthusiastic walkers.

Leslie Stephen

We can no longer be content with refuting our opponents; we are also bound to explain them. The vitality of any doctrine supposed to be erroneous proves that it cannot be entirely erroneous.

Leslie Stephen