Nine tenths of modern science is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their contemporaries thought dreamers - who were laughed at for caring for what did not concern them - who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a well from looking at the stars' - who were believed to be useless, if anyone could be such.

Walter Bagehot

Categorized in : Life Caring Stars

Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind.

Walter Bagehot

virtuous mind mean

A great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do.

Walter Bagehot

inspirational life funny

It is often said that men are ruled by their imaginations; but it would be truer to say they are governed by the weakness of their imaginations.

Walter Bagehot

weakness imagination men

You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor.

Walter Bagehot

tyrants real doors

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Walter Bagehot

pain philosophy art

Life is a compromise of what your ego wants to do, what experience tells you to do, and what your nerves let you do.

Walter Bagehot

courage war life

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.

Walter Bagehot

communication music silence

All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that "delays are dangerous," and that the sluggish man the man "who roasteth not that which he took in hunting" will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

Walter Bagehot

hunting men fall

The Sovereign has, under a constitutional monarchy such as ours, three rights - the right to be consulted, the right to encourage, the right to warn. And a king of great sense and sagacity would want no others.

Walter Bagehot

three kings rights

The being without an opinion is so painful to human nature that most people will leap to a hasty opinion rather than undergo it.

Walter Bagehot

political pain people

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

Walter Bagehot

calming meditation-and-yoga long

The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.

Walter Bagehot

eye writing book

Royalty is a government in which the attention of the nation is concentrated on one person doing interesting actions. A Republic is a government in which that attention is divided between many, who are all doing uninteresting actions. Accordingly, so long as the human heart is strong and the human reason weak, Royalty will be strong because it appeals to diffused feeling, and Republics weak because they appeal to the understanding.

Walter Bagehot

government strong heart

The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.

Walter Bagehot

independent nature real

The business of banking ought to be simple. If it is hard it is wrong. The only securities which a banker, using money that he may be asked at short notice to repay, ought to touch, are those which are easily saleable and easily intelligible.

Walter Bagehot

short-notice simple bankers

The characteristic danger of great nations, like the Romans or the English which have a long history of continuous creation, is that they may at last fail from not comprehending the great institutions which they have created

Walter Bagehot

lasts may long

What impresses men is not mind, but the result of mind.

Walter Bagehot

results mind men

Poverty is an anomaly to rich people; it is very difficult to make out why people who want dinner do not ring the bell.

Walter Bagehot

poverty anomalies people

The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards

Walter Bagehot

civilization culture firsts

A man's mother is his misfortune, but his wife is his fault.

Walter Bagehot

women inspiration mother