Quotes by John Lubbock

What we see depends mainly on what we look for

A cheerful friend is like a sunny day which sheds its brightness on all around.

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

To render ourselves insensible to pain we must forfeit also the possibilities of happiness.

A poor woman from Manchester on being taken to the seaside is said to have expressed her delight on seeing for the first time something of which there was enough for everybody.

A day of worry is more exhausting than a day of work.

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

Sunsets are so beautiful that they almost seem as if we were looking through the gates of Heaven.

Happiness is a thing to be practiced, like the violin.

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summers day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.”

“Our great mistake in education is, as it seems to me, the worship of book-learning–the confusion of instruction and education. We strain the memory instead of cultivating the mind. The children in our elementary schools are wearied by the mechanical act of writing, and the interminable intricacies of spelling; they are oppressed by columns of dates, by lists of kings and places, which convey no definite idea to their minds, and have no near relation to their daily wants and occupations; while in our public schools the same unfortunate results are produced by the weary monotony of Latin and Greek grammar. We ought to follow exactly the opposite course with children–to give them a wholesome variety of mental food, and endeavor to cultivate their tastes, rather than to fill their minds with dry facts. The important thing is not so much that every child should be taught, as that every child should be given the wish to learn. What does it matter if the pupil know a little more or a little less? A boy who leaves school knowing much, but hating his lessons, will soon have forgotten almost all he ever learned; while another who had acquired a thirst for knowledge, even if he had learned little, would soon teach himself more than the first ever knew.”

“The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.”