Quotes to inspire and reflect

Society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a single flat surface.

If your life at night is good, you think you have / Everything; but, if in that quarter things go wrong, / You will consider your best and truest interests /

Earth reserves no blessing / For the unblessed of Heaven!

We don’t know each other’s secrets quite so well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don’t always know our own secrets as well as we might.

If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.

The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

A hush is over everything— / Silent as women wait for love, / The world is waiting for the spring.

What if one does say the same things,—of course in a little different form each time,—over and over? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.

Romance only dies with life. No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us. But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque.

It is well that the stately synagogue should lift its walls by the side of the aspiring cathedral, a perpetual reminder that there are many mansions in Father’s earthly house as well as in the heavenly ones.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

All reformers are bachelors.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to^reak the bank of our answers.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

It is a very curious fact that, with all our boasted “free and equal superiority over the communities of the Old World, our people [Americans] have the most enormous appetite for Old World titles of distinction.

It is fairly obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.

Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.

A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat: that is progress.

In a crowd, on a journey at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

Everywhere the basis of principle is tradition.

The preacher’s garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.

Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned. .

Poverty comes pleading, not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.

I had rather ride on an ass that carries me than a horse that throws me.

A taste for dirty stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal.

Nothing can be so perfect while we possess it as it will seem when remembered.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a Way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

True poetry, the best of it, is but the ashes of a burnt-out passion.

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one’s way of taking a fact.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.

The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled—and it sleeps for ever in most historians—there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.