(review of 'The Lights Outside the Windows' by James White (collected in "Deadly Litter") https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/review/the-universe-is-antagonist-enough, 2014
2010s
“Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man.”
Virginibus Puerisque, Ch. 2.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)
Context: Hope is the boy, a blind, headlong, pleasant fellow, good to chase swallows with the salt; Faith is the grave, experienced, yet smiling man. Hope lives on ignorance; open-eyed Faith is built upon a knowledge of our life, of the tyranny of circumstance and the frailty of human resolution. Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. Hope is a kind old pagan; but Faith grew up in Christian days, and early learnt humility. In the one temper, a man is indignant that he cannot spring up in a clap to heights of elegance and virtue; in the other, out of a sense of his infirmities, he is filled with confidence because a year has come and gone, and he has still preserved some rags of honour. In the first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she is like himself - erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with ineffective qualities. You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that dolls are stuffed with sawdust, and yet are excellent play-things; that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realised, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities, perfect, you might say, in imperfection, and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model, and a noble spouse through life.
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Robert Louis Stevenson 118
Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer 1850–1894Related quotes

Spectator, No. 68.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

White here cites A. Harnack, Address Before the University of Berlin (1897), pp.16 and following
Source: Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1915), p. 114

The disagreeable Man (from Princess Ida).
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

“Let the mind of man be blind to coming doom; he fears, but leave him hope.”
Sit caeca futuri
mens hominum fati; liceat sperare timenti.
Book II, line 14 (tr. J. D. Duff).
Pharsalia

“A pleasant-smiling cheek, a speaking eye,
A brow for love to banquet royally.”
First Sestiad
Hero and Leander (published 1598)

“Shame on the man who goes to his grave escorted by the miserable hopes that have kept him alive.”