Quotes to inspire and reflect

Ambition is a meteor-gleam; / Fame a restless airy dream; / Pleasures, insects on the wing / Round Peace, th’ tend’rest flow’r of spring.

Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full / Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

Tranquillity! thou better name /(Than all the family of Fame.

Calm's not life’s crown, though calm is well.

A man can seldom—very, very, seldom—fight a winning fight against his training: the odds are too heavy.

There’s so much horseshit about babies; schools change every ten years. [My sister] raised a couple of nice ones by forcing them to be considerate or leave the room.... I think people act the way they’re expected to act.

The essence of dramatic tragedy is not unhappiness. It resides in the solemnity of the remorseless working of things.

It is no hard matter to get children; but after they are born, then begins the trouble, solicitude, and care rightly to train, principle, and bring them up.

Writers of comedy have outlook, whereas writers of tragedy have, according to them, insight.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Tragedy and comedy are simply questions of value; a little misfit in life makes us laugh; a great one is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.

Men play at tragedy because they do not believe in the reality of the tragedy which is actually being staged in the civilised world.

I suspect tragedy in the American countryside because all the people capable of it move to the big towns at twenty.

A tragedy means always a man’s struggle with that which is stronger than man.

Tragedy, no matter how sad, becomes boring to those not caught in its addictive caress.

No way of thinking or doing, however ancient, can be trusted without proof.

The less men are fettered by tradition, the greater becomes the inward activity of their motives; the greater, again, in proportion thereto, the outward restlessness, the confused flux of mankind, the polyphony of strivings.

Tradition is no longer a continuity but a series of sharp breaks. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt.

Old ways will always remain unless some one invents a new way and then lives and dies for it.

A tradition without intelligence is not worth having.

Tradition, thou art for suckling children, / Thou art the enlivening milk for babes, / But no meat for men is in thee.

They that reverence too much old times are but a scorn to the new.

I suspect that in our loathing of totalitarianism, there is infused a good deal of admiration for its efficiency.

I have read somewhere that in a totalitarian system martyrdom does better than thought.

It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr’s death for their convictions.

It is a good thing to demand liberty for ourselves and for those who agree with us, but it is a better thing and a rarer thing to give liberty to others who do not agree with us.

Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.

We go right enough, darling, if we go wrong together!

This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realized.

Fuller’s cigar in the night was a beacon warning carefree, frivolous people away. It was plainly a cigar smoked in anger.

The believing we do something when we do nothing is the first illusion of tobacco.

For thy sake, tobacco, I / Would do anything but die.

A man of no conversation should smoke.

Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigarette.

He will never have true friends who is afraid of making enemies.

There are men whose language is strong and defying enough, yet their eyes and their actions ask leave of other men to live.

In season, all is good.

To each thing belongs / its measure. Occasion is best to know.

Timeliness is best in all matters.

There are times when sense may be unseasonable, as well as truth.

We take no note of time / But from its loss.

I think time is a merciless thing. I think life is a process of burning oneself out and time is the fire that burns you. But I think the spirit of man is a good adversary.

lime bears away all things, even the mind.

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.

Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.

No preacher is listened to but Time, which gives us the same train and turn of thought that elder people have in vain tried to put into our heads before.

Great Time makes all things dim.

Time is a kindly God.