Quotes to inspire and reflect

Tis very puzzling on the brink / Of what is called Eternity to stare, / And know no more of what is here, than there.

O! many a shaft, at random sent / Finds mark the archer little meant!

The universe forces those who live in it to understand it.

I do not value any view of the universe into which man and the institutions of man enter very largely and absorb much of the attention. Man is but the place where I stand, and the prospect hence is infinite.

To be happy in this world, especially when youth is past, it is necessary to feel oneself not merely an isolated individual whose day will soon be over, but part of the stream of life flowing on from the first germ to the remote and unknown future.

The whole visible world is only an imperceptible atom in the ample bosom of nature. No idea approaches it.

The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.

The progress of the human race in understanding the universe has established a small corner of order in an increasingly disordered universe.

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

The universe does not jest with us, but is in earnest.

Law rules throughout existence, a Law which is not intelligent but Intelligence.

I do not wonder at a snowflake, a shell, a summer landscape, or the glory of the stars; but at the necessity of beauty under which the universe lies.

Horror causes men to clench their fists, and in horror men join together.

The idea that the universe is running down comes from a simple observation about machines. Every machine consumes more energy than it renders.

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.

Plurality which is not reduced to unity is confusion; unity which does not depend on plurality is tyranny.

A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies.

It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.

Our instrument and our hope is the United Nations, and I see little merit in the impatience of those who would abandon this imperfect world instrument because they dislike our imperfect world.

Every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.

Unionism seldom, if ever, uses such power as it has to insure better work; almost always it devotes a large part of that power to safeguarding bad work.

The poetry of art is in beholding the single tower; the poetry of nature in seeing the single tree; the poetry of love in following the single woman; the poetry of religion in worshipping the single star.

Strange how few, / After all's said and done, the things that are / Of moment.

Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into infinitude itself.

If misery loves company, misery has company enough.

Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy.

Is anyone in all the world / Safe from unhappiness?

Our aches and pains conform to opinion. A man’s as miserable as he thinks he is.

It would hardly be possible to exaggerate man’s wretchedness if it were not so easy to overestimate his sensibility.

Only those sadnesses are dangerous and bad which one carries about among people in order to drown them out.

Life is a well of joy; but for those out of whom an upset stomach speaks, which is the father of melancholy, all wells are poisoned.

I have discovered that all man’s unhappiness derives from only one source—not being able to sit quietly in a room.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.

A person who longs to leave the place where he lives is an unhappy person.

True melancholy breeds your perfect, fine wit, sir.

The world will never be long without some good reason to hate the unhappy; their real faults are immediately detected; and if those are not sufficient to sink them into infamy, an additional weight of calumny will be superadded.

Sadness is almost never anything but a form of fatigue.

For fate has wove the thread of life with pain, / And twins ev’n from the birth are misery and man!

Unhappiness does make people look stupid.

Is there anything men take more pains about than to render themselves unhappy?

Where there are two, one cannot be wretched, and one not.

This is what I think now: that the natural state of the sentient adult is a qualified unhappiness.

The Morning after Woe— / ’Tis frequently the Way— / Surpasses all that rose before— / For utter Jubilee—.

All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.

Naught so sweet as melancholy.

A man should always consider how much he has more than he wants, and how much more unhappy he might be than he really is.

Anyone who has ever experienced dehumanized life on welfare or any other confidence-shaking dependency knows that a paid job may be preferable to the dole, even when the handout is coming from a family member.

It were depression, too. They cut my wages down once at the foundry. They cut my wages down again. Then they cut my wages out, also the job.