Alfred Austin: Trending quotes (page 3)

“[T]here is no gardening without humility, an assiduous willingness to learn, and a cheerful readiness to admit that you were mistaken. Nature is continually sending even its oldest scholars to the bottom of the class for some egregious blunder.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love (1894), p. 13.

Learning , Nature

“Public opinion is no more than this,
What people think that other people think.”

Alfred Austin

Prince Lucifer (1887), Lucifer in Act VI, sc. ii; p. 189.

Thinking , People

“A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography. Show me your garden, provided it be your own, and I will tell you what you are like.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love (1894), p. 112.

History , Personality

“No one can rightly call his garden his own unless he himself made it.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love (1894), p. 112.

“Why from the plain truth should I shrink?
In woods men feel; in towns they think.
Yet, which is best? Thought, stumbling, plods
Past fallen temples, vanished gods,
Altars unincensed, fanes undecked,
Eternal systems flown or wrecked;
Through trackless centuries that grant
To the poor trudge refreshment scant,
Age after age, pants on to find
A melting mirage of the mind.
But feeling never wanders far,
Content to fare with things that are.”

Alfred Austin

Source: At the Gate of the Convent (1885), "A Defence of English Spring", p. 58.

God , Truth , Age , Past

“The most generous of critics, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot, let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the appellation of poetry. But on a very thin thread of meaning poetry, or a very fair imitation of it, may be hung by the aid of musical sound.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Bridling of Pegasus (1910), "The Essentials of Great Poetry", p. 7.

Music

“[P]eople who canalise their lives and prearrange their enjoyments lose much of the enchantment which attends the guiding beneficence of chance.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Lamia's Winter-Quarters (1898), p. 96.

Chance

“It is always delightful to have one's feelings expressed by some one else in language of enthusiasm one might oneself be afraid to employ.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Lamia's Winter-Quarters (1898), p. 68.

Feeling

“Men preach Philosophy, women practise it.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Lamia's Winter-Quarters (1898), Lamia on p. 66.

Women , Men

“One must be intoxicated by scenery, in order to appreciate it. Tranquil survey is not enough, and scrutinising curiosity is fatal.”

Alfred Austin

Source: Lamia's Winter-Quarters (1898), p. 6.

“If you are not something of a philosopher,—and by philosophy I understand a serene temper, and the maintaining of an equable mind under the sharpest disappointments,—I do not advise you to cultivate, or at any rate to grow enamoured of, a garden.”

Alfred Austin

Source: In Veronica's Garden (1895), p. 92.

Understanding , Disappointment

“Doth logic in the lily hide,
And where's the reason in the rose?”

Alfred Austin

The Door of Humility (1906)
Source: "Rome", XLI, line 11; p. 116.

“If Man makes Conscience, then being good
Is only being worldly wise,
And universal brotherhood
A comfortable compromise.”

Alfred Austin

The Door of Humility (1906)
Source: "Italy", XXXII, line 21; p. 82.

Universe

“Where in the lily lurks the mind,
Where in the rose discern the soul?More mindless still, stream, pasture, lake;
The mountains yet more heartless seem. […]It is their silence that appals,
Their aspect motionless that awes,
When searching spirit vainly calls
On the effect to bare the Cause.”

Alfred Austin

The Door of Humility (1906)
Source: "Switzerland", XXII, lines 15–18, 37–40; pp. 53–54.

Soul , Search , Mountain , Silence

“A little knowledge is said to be a dangerous thing, but it is not dangerous to the imagination. Knowledge is to the imagination what fuel is to flame. A little feeds it; a great deal extinguishes it.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Poet's Diary (1904), p. 158.

Imagination , Knowledge

“People living and dead, things past and present, all are contributories to that diminutive stream, oneself; a reflection which is essentially consoling, since it associates one with the sum of things and prevents one from living in barren isolation.”

Alfred Austin

Source: The Garden That I Love: Second Series (1907), p. 4.

People , Dead , Past