Book: What We Live By

Overview
Ernest Dimnet’s 1932 book What We Live By is a compact meditation on the forces that shape human lives from within. A French priest and essayist best known for The Art of Thinking, Dimnet turns from the craft of thought to the deeper currents that sustain it: ideals, imagination, habit, affection, faith, and the pressure of the age. The book reads as spiritual psychology colored by humane Catholic sensibility, urging readers to reclaim inner freedom in a world increasingly governed by haste, fashion, and borrowed opinions.

The sources of a life
Dimnet argues that people live less by events than by images and aims. Imagination furnishes the mind with pictures of what is admirable or base; memory stabilizes those pictures into standards; habit incarnates them in daily behavior. The will chooses among rival ideals, and character becomes the sediment of repeated choices. Because the interior determines the exterior, attention to one’s mental diet, what we contemplate, admire, and repeat, becomes the decisive moral task. True self-knowledge is not introspective fussiness but the lucidity that detects which ideas and affections are steering us.

Freedom from the crowd
A recurring theme is the conflict between personality and conformism. Journalism, social chatter, and the lure of novelty press minds into uniformity, replacing judgment with reflex. The remedy, Dimnet maintains, is not withdrawal from society but deliberate intervals of silence, solitude, and reading that restore proportion. Independent minds do not chase originality; they cultivate sincerity, patience, and the courage to assent to what they find true even when it is unfashionable. The first liberty is freedom from borrowed desires.

Work, ambition, and success
Dimnet distinguishes vocation from vanity. Work is dignified when it answers a real aptitude and serves more than the self; it corrodes when it becomes theater for reputation. He warns against the cult of speed that confuses activity with achievement and growth with accumulation. The enduring standard is quality: thoroughness, exactness, and the quiet pride of doing a thing well. Ambition may be a bracing ally if purified by usefulness, but it becomes a tyrant when it measures life by applause or compares constantly with rivals.

Affection and community
Family, friendship, and love are presented as schools of character. Love is not a mood but a persevering preference for another’s good; it requires tact, courtesy, and the discipline of listening. Real community respects interiority: no one can be compelled into sincerity, and the deepest exchanges depend on trust. Dimnet sees charity as the social expression of a clarified inner life, tempering judgment with mercy and replacing impatience with service.

Faith and the measure of meaning
Without sermonizing, Dimnet treats faith as the horizon that makes other values cohere. Faith educates desire, humbles intellect without crushing it, and gives time a direction. In the light of mortality, borrowed motives appear thin, while hope and gratitude become practical virtues. Prayer is described as attention raised to its highest power, a schooling in reality rather than an escape from it.

Style and enduring appeal
Written in aphoristic, conversational prose, the book blends counsel, observation, and quiet wit. Its enduring appeal lies in its insistence that the good life is an interior art practiced under modern conditions: lucid thinking, chosen ideals, disciplined work, faithful affection, and a faith large enough to hold them together. Dimnet’s central claim is simple and exacting: we live by what we admire, and we become what we repeatedly honor.