Quotes by Philip Gilbert Hamerton

_Væ solis_--Society and solitude alike necessary--The use of each--In solitude we know ourselves--Montaigne as a book-buyer--Compensations of solitude--Description of one who loved and sought it--How men are driven into solitude--Cultivated people in the provinces--Use of solitude as a protection for rare and delicate natures--Shelley's dislike to general society--Wordsworth and Turner--Sir Isaac Newton's repugnance to society--Auguste Comte--His systematic isolation and unshakable firmness of purpose--Milton and Bunyan--The solitude which is really injurious--Painters and authors--An ideal division of life. You cry to me _Væ solis!_ and the cry seems not the less loud and stirring that it comes in the folds of a letter. Just at first it quite startled and alarmed me, and made me strangely dissatisfied with my life and work; but farther reflection has been gradually reconciling me ever since, and now I feel cheerful again, and in a humor to answer you. _Woe unto him that is alone!_ This has been often said, but the studious recluse may answer, _Woe unto him that is never alone and cannot bear to be alone!_ We need society, and we need solitude also, as we need summer and winter, day and night, exercise and rest. I thank heaven for a thousand pleasant and profitable conversations with acquaintances and friends; I thank heaven also, and not less gratefully, for thousands of sweet hours that have passed in solitary thought or labor, under the silent stars. Society is necessary to give us our share and place in the collective life of humanity, but solitude is necessary to the maintenance of the individual life. Society is to the individual what travel and commerce are to a nation; whilst solitude represents the home life of the nation, during which it develops its especial originality and genius. The life of the perfect hermit, and that of those persons who feel themselves nothing individually, and have no existence but what they receive from others, are alike imperfect lives. The perfect life is like that of a ship of war which has its own place in the fleet and can share in its strength and discipline, but can also go forth alone in the solitude of the infinite sea. We ought to belong to Society, to have our place in it, and yet to be capable of a complete individual existence outside of it.

And this is why, to a sincere student, all external pressure, whether of examiners, or poverty, or business engagements, which causes him to leave work behind him which was not done as it ought to have been done, is so grievously, so intolerably vexatious. LETTER II. TO A YOUNG MAN OF GREAT TALENT AND ENERGY WHO HAD MAGNIFICENT PLANS FOR THE FUTURE. Mistaken estimates about time and occasion--The Unknown Element--Procrastination often time's best preserver--Napoleon's advice to do nothing at all--Use of deliberation and of intervals of leisure--Artistic advantages of calculating time--Prevalent childishness about time--Illusions about reading--Bad economy of reading in languages we have not mastered--That we ought to be thrifty of time, but not avaricious--Time necessary in production--Men who work best under the sense of pressure--Rossini--That these cases prove nothing against time-thrift--The waste of tune from miscalculation--People calculate accurately for short spaces, but do not calculate so well for long ones--Reason for this--Stupidity of the Philistines about wasted time--Töpffer and Claude Tillier--Retrospective miscalculations, and the regrets that result from them. Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author? On the same principle, people will give a higher price to a picture-dealer than they would have given to the painter himself. The picture that has been once bought has a recommendation, and the quoted passage is both recommended and isolated from the context. Trusting to this well-known principle, although I am aware that you have read everything that Sir Arthur Helps has published, I proceed to make the following quotation from one of his wisest books. "Time and occasion are the two important circumstances in human life, as regards which the most mistaken estimates are made. And the error is universal. It besets even the most studious and philosophic men. This may notably be seen in the present day, when many most distinguished men have laid down projects for literature and philosophy, to be accomplished by them in their own lifetime, which would require several men and many lifetimes to complete; and, generally speaking, if any person, who has passed the meridian of life, looks back upon his career, he will probably own that his greatest errors have arisen from his not having made sufficient allowance for the length of time which his various schemes required for their fulfilment.