GERALD STANLEY LEE QUOTES

American clergyman & author (1862-1944)

Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds


The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern life that the geography of the world had been changed to conform to it. We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds


I am through generalizing about ideas apart from men who generate them. I am through writing books about the dead, or writing books about the living to the unborn (tucked away as Literature) or writing books about the unborn to the living (whiffed away as prophecy). I put up my life on advertising the living to the living, on making men of genius known to the people and interpreted to their time, that the time in which I live, may live face to face with its men of vision and that they may live face to face with one another.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

The House of Twenty Seven Gardens


The first and most practical step in getting what one wants in this world is wanting it. One would think that the next step would be expressing what one wants. But it almost never is. It generally consists in wanting it still harder.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds

Tags: desire


It is never the machines that are dead. It is only the mechanically-minded men that are dead.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds


We may have hell if we have war, and we may have hell if we have peace. But if we have no vision for what we do, we have hell anyway.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

The Air-line to Liberty: A Prospectus for All Nations


America is a tune. It must be sung together.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds

Tags: America


New York is the capital, the national headquarters of homelessness.... No one feels he belongs here.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

The House of Twenty Seven Gardens

Tags: New York


There are two kinds of second class men in business. There is the man who puts money first and service second. There is the man who puts service first and money second, who never has any money. The first class man in business is the man who is made up out of rolling the other two kinds into one man and working them together.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

The House of Twenty Seven Gardens


The great man is the man who can get himself made and who will get himself made out of anything he finds at hand.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds


I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds


Copernicus ... fared forth into space, and discovered the centre of all power to be in the sun. It grieved people a good deal to find how much more important the sky was than they were, and their whole little planet with all of them on it. The idea that that big blue field up there, empty by day and with such crowds of little faint dots in it all night, was the real thing -- the big, final, and important thing -- and that they and their churches and popes and pyramids and nations should just dance about it for millions of years like a mote in a sunbeam, hurt their feelings at first. But it did them good. It started them looking UP.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds


No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds

Tags: writing


I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds

Tags: Christianity


The new industrial world is coming to us one new free-born industry at a time.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Inspired Millionaires


A man's success in business today turns upon his power of getting people to believe he has something that they want.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds

Tags: business


A vice is a failure of desire.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Crowds

Tags: vice


When America has been discovered in America it will be discovered in Europe. They are looking for America now.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

The Air-line to Liberty: A Prospectus for All Nations


Every day I sit in trains and streetcars and pick out people I like. I wish I could follow them home, find some excuse they would not mind, for knowing them. Then I would find some way of getting them all together -- the people I like, and making a little city of them, or beginning a new fresh little world with them -- all kinds of people, the more kinds the better; some quite poor, some very rich; and people with queer clothes too sometimes, just their faces shining out of them or over them; people that draw one to them.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

The House of Twenty Seven Gardens


Machinery makes men like itself.

GERALD STANLEY LEE

Inspired Millionaires