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Henry S. Haskins Quotes

Henry S. Haskins was a stockbroker and man of letters. His aphorisms were edited and published anonymously with an introduction by Albert Jay Nock in 1940. Wikipedia  

✵ 1875 – 1957
Henry S. Haskins: 84 quotes2 likes

Famous Henry S. Haskins Quotes

“Many of us are impersonations of what we know we ought to be.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 82

“The darkness around us might somewhat light up if we would first practice using the light we have on the place we are.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 80

“Discontent follows ambition like a shadow.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 137

“It is only an uncivilized world that would worship civilization.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 22

“The art of a pedant is to divert his pupils from noticing the smallness of his puddle, and to make them attribute his apparent size to his being a really big toad.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), pp. 91-92

“Imitation can acquire pretty much everything but the power which created the thing imitated.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 96

Henry S. Haskins Quotes about learning

“The man who is too old to learn was probably always too old to learn.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 74

“It is the semi-learned who scorn the ignorant; the learned know too much about them for that.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 92

“There are many branches of learning, but only the one solid tree-trunk of wisdom.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 91

“The rare individual who has learned to govern himself is too fed up with the labor of it to want to govern anybody else.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 94

Henry S. Haskins: Trending quotes

“Normal is the wrong name often used for average.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p.135

“Good behavior is the last refuge of mediocrity.”

Henry S. Haskins

Variant: Sedate ignorance is the last stage of deterioration.
Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 135

“When a man’s success becomes commonplace to him, it is his success no longer.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 104

Henry S. Haskins Quotes

“The highest grades of humanity have passed through the millstones more than once.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 92

“Dive where the water is deep.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 49

“A soul which is truly in earnest is not above disabling the body to discourage dangerous competition.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 81

“When study becomes labor, we had better change the subject-matter as quickly as possible.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 35

“Only occasional hours meet our full requirements.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 37

“The deadliest contagion is majority opinion.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 108

“Thoughts left unsaid are never wasted.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 22

“It is getting what we started to get, not the thing got, which spells success.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 133

“Some talk in quarto volumes and act in pamphlets.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 77

“Contentment has been worn as a crown by no end of sleepy heads.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 104

“It is not so much tutoring that the minds needs, but clearer recognition and better use of what it already knows.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 92

“A distant destination austerely reached rarely compensates for a loved starting-point forever lost.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 115

“Compliments have lost their lure by the time a man does not have to fish for them.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 100

“If imagination would disentangle itself from absurdities, soon we should have it harnessed to reason, pulling the same plough.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 117

“Make a party over your negative thoughts, assuring them that they are the safest, the most cautious, company you have ever kept. At first they will swallow your flattery, but then suddenly, stricken with shame, and knowing themselves for the impostors they are, out and off they will go.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 77

“Tradition supplants inspiration with the warmed-over article.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 134

“Where you find imagination tracing the outlines and reason filling in the details, there you have a man.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 118

“When you think of the silly things people have said to you which have stopped you from saying the same silly things, you simply can’t do justice to your gratitude.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 107

“He who longs for the far-away proves thereby that he has corrupted the near-at-hand.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 111

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are but tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 131

“We fall short when we ascribe all the modes of happiness to walking in paths of rectitude. There are joys which only tramps and thieves know.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 116

“Remembrance of hopes that were silly has an especial tenderness, for much of their silliness came from a thoughtless credulity which we would be glad to have back again.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 46

“Avoid membership in a body of persons pledged to only one side of anything.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 30

“Who can set us straight in our labyrinth from the mazes of his own?”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 132

“It would be as natural for a full-grown tiger to mew as for a man released from the slavery of imitations ever to go back to his neighbor again with: “What do you think of this? What do you advise about that?””

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 52

“There is not an ounce of our former strength which is not doing some sort of job, right now.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 38

“If you obtain provision for yourself of spiritual abundance, don’t throw the surplus at people’s heads; feed it back into your own industry as capital for the production of more abundance.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 37

“The way to get the most out of a victory is to follow it with another that makes it look small.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 80

“When you start to indulge yourself, remember it is what they do with invalids and children.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 81

“The tongues of conscience need a conscience of their own to keep them from speaking before they know what they are talking about.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 29

“If someone offers to furnish a sure test, ask what the test was which made the sure test sure.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 120

“Having climbed to a height, it is easier to slip from it than to stay there after the zest of striving is removed.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 101

“No conscience which is a palimpsest of the consciences of others is a safe guide.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 29

“Vacant minds have their uses, yet it seems a pity to waste first-class bodies on them.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 70

“The unfortunate who has to travel for amusement lacks capacity for amusement.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 70

“Some have half-baked ideas because their ideals are not heated up enough.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 69

“It is the honest lies we tell—statements factually correct and essentially deceiving—which debauch our manhood and stunt our growth.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 68

“We cannot be too earnest, too persistent, too determined, about living superior to the herd instinct.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 79

“We condemn a sin before we have even tried it.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 135

“If we exiled our sins, our virtues would get lonely without their old sparring partners.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 31

“It is when we start to discipline our mind that we discover how many undisclosed relationships it already has.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 94

“Expletives serve opinions well which are not sure enough of themselves to risk expression in restrained language.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 100

“How often our bosom swells and our temples throb to a thought which proves itself not to be worth anything but for the exaltation we feel while the swelling and throbbing are going on, which after all is something.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 139

“For a competent audience, uncommon men must have other uncommon men.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 146

“Thought the fool is to be pitied, still he is spared watching spurious wisdom turn to ashes in his head.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 115

“Many a superior brain is blockaded by inferior thoughts.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 69

“We should train our desires to show the way to our dreams.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 103

“Academic questions are interlopers in a world where so few of the real ones have been answered.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 94

“We are no more alike under the skin than we are on top of it.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 134

“The things we counterfeit are not worth the trouble of falling into disgrace with ourselves.”

Henry S. Haskins

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 140