Quotes to inspire and reflect

To-day violence is the rhetoric of the period.

The pornography of violence of course far exceeds, in volume and general acceptance, sexual pornography, in this Puritan land of ours.

Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.

The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.

Now at last the slowly gathered, long-pent-up fury of the storm broke upon us. Four or five millions of men met each other in the first shock of the most merciless of all the wars of which record has been kept.

God hates violence. He has ordained that all men / fairly possess their property, not seize it.

Nurse one vice in your bosom. Give it the attention it deserves and let your virtues spring up modestly around it. Then you'll have the miser who’s no liar; and the drunkard who’s the benefactor of a whole city.

For lawless joys a bitter ending waits.

Jupiter has loaded us with a couple of wallets: the one, filled with our own vices, he has placed at our backs; the other, heavy with those of others, he has hung before.

This is the danger, when vice becomes a precedent.

Vice often rides triumphant in virtue’s chariot.

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

Looking, he thought that to come to Venice by the station is like entering a palace by the back door.

I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when the^came in contact with the more civilized.

Is there anyone but must repress a secret thrill, on arriving in Venice for the first time—or returning thither after long absence—and stepping into a Venetian gondola?

Man habitually sacrifices his life to his purse, but he sacrifices his purse to his vanity.

A vain man may become proud and imagine himself pleasing to all when he is in reality a universal nuisance.

It is not vain-glory for a man and his glass to confer in his own chamber.

We crave support in vanity, as we do in religion, and never forgive contradictions in that sphere.

The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions.

He who denies his own vanity usually possesses it in so brutal a form that he instinctively shuts his eyes to avoid the necessity of despising himself.

The anxiety we have for the figure we cut, for our personage, is constantly cropping out. We are showing off and are often more concerned with making a display than with living. Whoever feels observed observes himself.

The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

The real price of everything, what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.

What is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values.

The value of a man can only be measured with regard to other men.

Those things are dearest to us that have cost us most.

The world is always curious, and people become valuable merely for their inaccessibility.

Let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.

That which cost little is less valued.

The world is an old woman, and mistakes any gilt farthing for a gold coin; whereby being often cheated, she will thenceforth trust nothing but the common copper.

[T]he hierarchy of power is not the same as the hierarchy of value. A good human is higher than the animals on both scales; an evil human is high on the scale of power, but at the very bottom of the scale of values.

Ideal society is a drama enacted exclusively in the imagination.

The sure way of knowing nothing about life is to try to make oneself useful.

Uselessness is a fatal accusation to bring against any act which is done for its presumed utility, but those which are done for their own sake are their own justification.

It is a great misfortune to be of use to nobody; scarcely less to be of use to everybody.

I have known some men possessed of good qualities which were very serviceable to others, but useless to themselves; like a sun-dial on the front of a house, to inform the neighbours and passengers, but not the owner within.

In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy.

To reach perfection, we must all pass, one by one, through the death of self-effacement.

Once men are caught up in an event they cease to be afraid. Only the unknown frightens men.

We are ignorant of the Beyond because this ignorance is the condition sine qua non of our own life. Just as ice cannot know fire except by melting, by vanishing.

Our dream dashes itself against the great mystery like a wasp against a window pane. Less merciful than man, God never opens the window.

Would there be this eternal seeking if the found existed?

Grieve not, because thou understandest not life’s mystery; behind the veil is concealed many a delight.

Penetrating so many secrets, we cease to believe in the unknowable. But there it sits nevertheless, calmly licking its chops.

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.

All is riddle, and the key to a. riddle is another riddle.