George Henry Lewes Quotes

The great truths of human life do not spring new born to each new generation. They derive from long experience. They are the gathered wisdom of the race. They are renewed in time of conflict and danger.

Our knowledge is the amassed thought and experience of innumerable minds.

The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neandertal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what the mythos is.

We're growing up together, the human race. And we've discovered a lot of things that we didn't know. We're finding our way. Instead of thinking about doomsday all the time, think about how beautiful the world is. We're all together, and together we're getting wiser.

Common experience is the gold reserve which confers an exchange value on the currency which words are; without this reserve of shared experiences, all our pronouncements are checks drawn on insufficient funds.

A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.

Everything has been said, and we are more than seven thousand years of human thought too late.

The information is in the people, not in your head.

Science is a progressive activity. The outstanding peculiarity of man is that he stumbled onto the possibility of progressive activities. Such progress, the accumulation of experience from generation to generation, depended first on the development of language, then of writing and finally of printing. These allowed the accumulation of tradition and of knowledge, of the whole aura of cultural inheritance that surrounds us. This has so conditioned our existence that it is almost impossible for us to stop and examine the nature of our culture. We accept it as we accept the air we breathe; we are as unconscious of our culture as a fish, presumably, is of water.

One united people, regardless of race, language or religion.

Whatever sense of national unity pervades the inhabitants of the rocky mountains, low-lying coastal marshes and baked river beds of Albania is sprung from the necessity of their struggling continually to keep out invaders who would annex this or that district, rather than form strong racial, religious or cultural bonds. In Albania such bonds are indeed far from strong (apart from that of language, which is however spoken in a variety of dialects), as is shown by the wars between tribes and sects which are usually in progress whenever some external danger does not compel them momentarily to close their ranks.

The New Mainstream, is the future strength of the American economic engine. I believe we need to stop thinking and acting as minorities, as none of the numbers support that concept anymore. We should even shun the term “People of Color,” which feels a little too much like “Colored People” reversed, to me. Besides I would imagine if we used the term “People Without Color,” that wouldn’t set well with those that it would be a descriptor of. We are all Americans (every color race and creed) all with unique cultural contributions that are part of the greater fabric of this country.

Human knowledge is never contained in one person. It grows from the relationships we create between each other and the world, and still, it is never complete.

If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art.

There is an unbroken continuum from the wisdom of the body to the wisdom of the mind, from the wisdom of the individual to the wisdom of the race.

Changing the world takes more than everything any one person knows, but not more than we know together.

Human wisdom is the aggregate of all human experience, constantly accumulating, and selecting, and re-organizing its own materials.

Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions. That which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, it will suffer him to say in proverbs without contradiction.

Music is the language of the soul; and for two people of different nations or races to unite, there is no better means than music

What we call wisdom is the result of all the wisdom of past ages.

A Chinese poet many centuries ago noticed that to re-create something in words is like being alive twice.

The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe.

Grammar is a piano I play by ear.

The wise man knows without traveling.

We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success. What we do best or most perfectly is what we have most thoroughly learned by the longest practice, and at length it falls from us without our notice, as a leaf from a tree.