William Macneile Dixon (1866–1946) was a British author and academic.
Birth is the sudden opening of a window, through which you look out upon a stupendous prospect. For what has happened? A miracle. You have exchanged nothing for the possibility of everything.
To understand any living thing, you must, so to say, creep within and feel the beating of its heart.
Our business is not to solve problems beyond our mortal powers, but to see to it that our thoughts are not unworthy of the great theme.
If there be a skeptical star I was born under it. Yet I have lived all my days in complete astonishment.
Men ardently pursue truth, assuming it will be angels' bread when found.
Ideas, like individuals, live and die. They flourish, according to their nature, in one soil or climate and droop in another. They are the vegetation of the mental world.
All finite things have their roots in the infinite, and if you wish to understand life at all, you cannot tear out its context. And that context, astounding even to bodily eyes, is the heaven of stars and the incredible procession of the great galaxies.
There is more than a morsel of truth in the saying, "He who hates vice hates mankind. "
Our desires attract supporting reasons as a magnet the iron fillings.
The facts of the present won't sit still for a portrait. They are constantly vibrating, full of clutter and confusion.