Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

A man of no conversation should smoke.

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

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

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

In season, all is good.

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

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

Timeliness is best in all matters.

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.

Time moves slowly, but passes quickly.

lime bears away all things, even the mind.

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.

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

Great Time makes all things dim.

Time is a kindly God.

Time is that in which all things pass away.

Time is like an enterprising manager always bent on staging some new and surprising production, without knowing very well what it will be.

Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them.

Both in thought and in feeling, even though time be real, to realise the unimportance of time is the gate of wisdom.

In theory one is aware that the earth revolves, but in practice one does not perceive it, the ground upon which one treads seems not to move, and one can live undisturbed. So it is with Time in one’s life.

l ime heals griefs and quarrels, for we change and are no longer the same persons.

When one day is like all the others, then they are all like one; complete uniformity would make the longest life seem short, and as though it had stolen away from us unawares.

Time flies apace—we would fain believe that everything flies forward with it.

Time is the rider that breaks youth.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time—the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.