Quotes to inspire and reflect

The gardener Adam and his wife Smile at the claims of long descent.

 

The lion on your old stone gates Is not more cold to you than I.

 

I am better than my reputation.

 

You saw his weakness, and he will never forgive you.

 

The richest monarch in the Christian world; The sun in my own dominions never sets. 3

 

Many a crown shines spotless now That yet was deeply sullied in the winning.

 

Your thighs are appletrees whose blossoms touch the sky.

Your kneesare a southern breeze—or a gust of snow. Agh! what sort of man was Fragonard?

They told me to take a streetcar named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!

Decidedly one of us will have to go.

Each time one loves is the only time that one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it.

Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital “I.”

This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.

[ To a customs official upon arriving in New York in 1882 :] I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Her capacity for family affection is extraordinary. When her third husband died, her hair turned quite gold from grief.

Every American bride is taken there [Niagara Falls], and the sight of the stupendous waterfall must be one of the earliest, if not the keenest, disappointments in American married life.

Blessings on thee, little man,

The untold want by life and land ne’er granted,

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden.

I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.

In Westphalie, in Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh’scastle, there was a young boy upon whom nature had bestowed the gentlest manners. His soul shined through his face. He had fairly sound judgment, with the simplest spirit; this is why, I believe, they called him Candide.

We had forgotten that wars were fought by babies. When I saw those freshly shaved faces, it was a shock. “My God, my God—” I said to myself, “it’s the Children’s Crusade.”

Fugit inreparabile tempus .

Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes .

Dieu créa l’homme, et ne le trouvant pas assez seul, il lui donne une compagne pour lui faire mieux sentir sa solitude .

Et, Ô ces voix d’enfants chantants dans la coupole!

The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it, constraints aping marriage appear.

Then, with that faint fleeting smile playingabout his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty, the undefeated, inscrutable to the last.

On the seashore of endless worlds children meet. Tempest roams in the pathless sky, ships are wrecked in the trackless water, death is abroad and children play. On the seashore of endless worlds is the great meeting of children.

O may my heart’s truth

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from Being a Burden to theirParents, or the Country, and for Making ThemBeneficial to the Public.

The other day we had a long discourse with[Lady Orkney] about love; and she told us asaying . . . which I thought excellent, that inmen, desire begets love ; and in women, love begetsdesire .

Men are never so serious, thoughtful, and intent, as when they are at Stool.

But when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride , it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience.

How do you like to go up in a swing,

Falling in love is the one illogical adventure, the one thing of which we are tempted to think as supernatural, in our trite and reasonable world.

Every true passion thinks only of itself.

If her horny feet protrude, they come

[ Remark, 1925 :] The Jews have produced only three originative geniuses; Christ, Spinoza, and myself.

What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about it if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.

Someone asked Sophocles, “How is your sex-life now? Are you still able to have a woman?” He replied, “Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.”

It is funny the two things most men are proudest of is the thing that any man can do and doing does in the same way, that is being drunk and being the father of their son.

The children now love luxury, they have bad manners, contempt for authority, they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the slaves of their households. They no longer rise when an elder enters the room, they contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up the dainties at the table, cross their legs and tyrannize over their pedagogues.

[ When Isadora Duncan regretted that they could not have a child together, saying, “Think what a child it would be, with my body and your brain” :] I know, but suppose the child was so unlucky as to have my body and your brain?

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.

The Family is a petty despotism; . . . a school in which men learn to despise women and women to mistrust men (much more than is necessary); a slaughterhouse for children (the firstborn succumbing to unskilled treatment, the lastborn to neglect). . . . Unfortunately, we cannot as yet do without it; and therefore we put a good face on the matter by conferring upon it the conventional attribute of sacredness, and impudently proclaiming it the source of all the virtues it has well-nigh killed in us.

The first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attains years of discretion.

[ Of a girl before marriage :] As an apple reddens on the high bough; high atop the highest bough the apple pickers passed it by—no, not passed it by, but they could not reach it.