Quotes to inspire and reflect

No man ever quite believes in any other man. One may believe in an idea absolutely, but not in a man.

Various are the uses of friends, beyond all else / in difficulty, but joy also looks for trust that is clear / in the eyes.

Think naught a trifle, though it small appear; / Small sands the mountain, moments make the year, / And trifles life.

The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust.

A mere trifle consoles us, for a mere trifle distresses us.

Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy, when great ones are not in the way: for want of a block he will stumble at a straw.

A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection.

For the person for whom small things do not exist, the great is not great.

Little things seem nothing, but they give peace, like those meadow flowers which individually seem odorless but all together perfume the air.

The displacement of a little sand can change occasionally the course of deep rivers.

Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Us sing and dance, make faces and give flower bouquets, trying to be loved. You ever notice that trees do everything to git attention we do, except walk?

The only treaties that ought to count are those which would effect a settlement between ulterior motives.

History is a pathetic junkyard of broken treaties.

Peace does not rest in charters and covenants alone. It lies in the hearts and minds of the people.

The treason pleases, but the traitors are odious.

No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.

If one’s object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.

To forget pain is to be painless; to forget care is to be rid of it; to go abroad is to accomplish both.

To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye—what ye say of me is now of no consequence.

I know people who are so immersed in road maps that they never see the countryside they pass through, and others who, having traced a route, are held to it as though held by flanged wheels to rails.

Niagara Falls is very nice. I’m very glad I saw it, because from now on if I am asked whether I have seen Niagara Falls I can say yes, and be telling the truth for once.

When I was at home, I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.

Those who pass their lives in foreign travel find they contract many ties of hospitality, but form no friendships.

The traveller must be somebody and come from somewhere, so that his definite character and moral

Against my will, in the course of my travels, the belief that everything worth knowing was known at Cambridge gradually wore off. In this respect my travels were very useful to me.

A tourist is an ugly human being.

My heart is warm with the friends I make, / And better friends I’ll not be knowing; /Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take, / No matter where it’s going.

The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.

[EJvery native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this.

They change their climate, not their soul, who rush across the sea.

Your first most typical figure in any new place turns out to be a bluff or a local nuisance.

I don’t much care where I am anymore, nor expect very much from places.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing.

The world is his who has money to go over it.

No man should travel until he has learned the language of the country he visits. Otherwise he voluntarily makes himself a great baby,—so helpless and so ridiculous.

To roam / Giddily, and be everywhere but at home, /.Such freedom doth a banishment become.

Men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places.

Why do the wrong people travel, travel, travel,AVhen the right people stay back home?

What affects men sharply about a foreign nation is not so much finding or not finding familiar things; it is rather not finding them in the familiar place.

Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try to understand each other, we may even become friends.

Road, n. A strip of land along which one may pass from where it is too tiresome to be to where it is futile to go.

The less a tourist knows, the fewer mistakes he need make, for he will not expect himself to explain ignorance.

God Almighty Himself must have been hilarious when human beings so mingled iron and water and fire as to make a railroad train!

We are things of a day. What are we? What are we not? The shadow of a dream / is man, no more.

Worlds on worlds are rolling ever / From creation to decay, / Like the bubbles on a river / Sparkling, bursting, borne away.

The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon / Turns Ashes—or it prospers; and anon, / Like Snow upon the Desert’s dusty Face, / Lighting a little hour or two—is gone.

Our lives ... are but a little while, / so let them run as sweetly as you can, / and give no thought to grief from day to day. / For time is not concerned to keep our hopes, / but hurries on its business, and is gone.