Quotes to inspire and reflect

Do you know why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories.

 

[ Response to being asked, “Where do you live?” :] Second to the right and then straight on till morning.

 

All children, except one, grow up.

 

He watched, stunned, and while he was watching, Rick died. He could tell when it happened. There was a difference.

 

The tragedy of a man who has found himself out.

 

Old people are a kind of monsters to little folks; mild manifestations of the terrible, it may be, but still, with their white locks and ridged and grooved features, which those horrid little eyes exhaust of their details like so many microscopes, not exactly what human beings ought to be.

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

If you direct your whole thought to work itself, none of the things which invade eyes or ears will reach the mind.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

What a woman says to an eager lover, / write it on running water, write it on air.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money. A man’s learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance; but the

A woman can be anything that the man who loves her would have her be.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one’s virtues.

I don’t believe the Devil would give half as much for the services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.

What we have never had, remains; / It is the things we have that go.

[I]n the novel we can know people perfectly, and, apart from the general pleasure of reading, we can find here a compensation for their dimness in life.

In daily life we never understand each other, neither complete clairvoyance nor complete confessional exists.

All uncertainty is fruitful ... so long as it is accompanied by the wish to understand.

Truth does not lie beyond humanity, but is one of the products of the human mind and feeling.

Man’s passion for truth is such that he will welcome the bitterest of all postulates so long as it strikes him as true.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

[Tolerance] is just a makeshift, suitable for an overcrowded and overheated planet. It carries on when love gives out, and love generally gives out as soon as we move away from our home and our friends.

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

We find it hard to get and to keep any private property in thought. Other people are all the time saying the same things we are hoarding to say when we get ready.

There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of mind suffers, as compared with the man of action. While he is talcing an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he lets his chance slip through his fingers.

Thinking is hard work. One can’t bear burdens and ideas at the same time.

Taste is the fundamental quality which sums up all other qualities. It is the ne plus ultra of the intelligence.

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

Suffering is the sole origin of consciousness.

One has to dismount from an idea, and get into the saddle again, at every parenthesis.

Neanderthal man listened to stories, if one may judge by the shape of his skull.

Stupidity often saves a man from going mad.

Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.

A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.