Quotes to inspire and reflect

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever, or amiable.

The diffusion of taste is not the same thing as the improvement of taste.

Every one carries his own inch-rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.

Be equal to your talent, not your age. / At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.

Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred.

I concluded that my mind was so ordinary, which is to say empty, that I could never be anything but a reasonably good camera. So I would content myself with a more common and general sort of achievement than serious art, which was money.

What a man is begins to betray itself when his talent decreases—when he stops showing what he can do.

Behind a remarkable scholar one finds, not infrequently, a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist quite often—a very remarkable man.

There is no so wretched and coarse a soul wherein some particular faculty is not seen to shine.

Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent, / which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them.

Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.

A forte always makes a foible.

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

Talk to every woman as if you loved her, and to every man as if he bored you, and at the end of your first season you will have the reputation of possessing the most perfect social tact.

No one is so accursed by fate, / No one so utterly desolate, / But some heart, though unknown, / Responds unto his own.

Wisdom must go with Sympathy, else the emotions will become maudlin and pity may be wasted on a poodle instead of a child—on a field-mouse instead of a human soul.

Search not a wound too deep lest thou make a new one.

Sympathy is a supporting atmosphere, and in it we unfold easily and well.

Unto a broken heart / No other one may go / Without the high prerogative / Itself hath suffered too.

A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him.

Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.

Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species.

Whether science—and indeed civilization in general—can long survive depends upon psychology, that is to say, it depends upon what human beings desire.

It isn’t important to come out on top, what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

Unfamiliarity lends weight to misfortune,'and there was never a man whose grief was not heightened by surprise.

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

A man surprised is half beaten.

Men become superstitious, not because they have too much imagination, but because they are not aware that they have any.

The superstition in which we grew up, / Though we may recognize it, does not lose / Its power over us.—Not all are free / Who make mock of their chains.

All people have their blind side—their superstitions.

In all superstition wise men follow fools.

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

Faith in the supernatural is a desperate wager made by man at the lowest ebb of his fortunes.

we parted each feeling / superior to the other / and is not that / feeling after all one of the great / desiderata of social intercourse.

The highest summits and those elevated above the level of other things are mostly blasted by envy as by a thunderbolt.

To me one man is worth ten thousand if he is first- rate.

Whoever rises above those who once pleased themselves with equality, will have many malevolent gazers at his eminence.

Light boats sail swift, though greater hulks draw deep.

Be more than man, or thou’rt less than an ant.

Anyone who has looked deeply into The world may guess how much wisdom lies in the superficiality of men. The instinct that preserves them teaches them to be flighty, light, and false.

God will have life to be real; we will be damned, but it shall be theatrical.

The Florida sun seems not much a single thing overhead but a set of klieg lights that pursue you everywhere with an even white illumination.

There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.

Every beauty, when out of its place, is a beauty no longer.

With our mortal minds we should seek from the gods that which becomes us.

The paintings by dead men who were poor most of their lives are the most valuable pieces in my collection. And if an artist wants to really jack up the prices of his creations, may I suggest this: suicide.

Send not for a hatchet to break open an egg with.