Quotes to inspire and reflect

All thought is a feat of association: having what’s in front of you bring up something in your mind that you almost didn’t know you knew.

What is the hardest task in the world? To think.

If a man sits down to think, he is immediately asked if he has the headache.

Thought makes every thing fit for use.

What was once thought can never be unthought.

In itself, a thought, / A slumbering thought, is capable of years, / And curdles a long life into one hour.

One thought fills immensity.

The utmost abstractions are the true weapons with which to control our thought of concrete fact.

Let us work without theorizing ... tis the only way to make life, endurable.

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity.

Theory helps us to bear our ignorance of facts.

It is only theory that makes men completely incautious.

To be sure, theory is useful. But without warmth of heart and without love it bruises the very ones it claims to save.

No theory is good except on condition that one use it to go beyond.

In theory, there is nothing to hinder our following what we are taught, but in life there are many things to draw us aside.

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearances of reconciliation between the theory and the practice of life.

Theology is an attempt to explain a subject by men who do not understand it. The intent is not to tell the truth but to satisfy the questioner.

Theological religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.

Hypotheses are only the pieces of scaffolding which are erected round a building during the course of construction, and which are taken away as soon as the edifice is completed.

The most tedious of all discourses are on the subject of the Supreme Being.

First, I hate all theological controversy: it is wearing to the temper, and is I believe (at all events when viva voce) worse than useless.

Some mystery should be left in the revelation of character in a play, just as a great deal of mystery is always left in the revelation of character in life, even in one’s own character to himself.

On the stage it is always now; the personages are standing on that razor-edge, between the past and the future, w'hich is the essential character of conscious being.

We live in what is, but we find a thousand ways not to face it. Great theater strengthens our faculty to face it.

A dramatist is one who from his earliest years has found that sheer gazing at the shocks and countershocks among people is quite sufficiently engrossing without having to encase it in comment.

A talent for drama is not a talent for writing, but is an ability to articulate human relationships.

Surely no other American institution is so bound around and tightened up by rules, strictures, adages, and superstitions as the Broadway theatre.

The theater needs continual reminders that there is nothing more debasing than the work of those who do well what is not worth doing at all.

1 see the playwright as a lay preacher peddling the ideas of his time in popular form.

Not to go to the theatre is like making one’s toilet without a mirror.

The drama is make-believe. It does not deal with truth but with effect.

The theater, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

We do not go [to the theatre], like our ancestors, to escape from the pressure of reality, so much as to confirm our experience of it.

The inclination to digress is human. But the dramatist must avoid it even more strenuously than the saint must avoid sin, for while sin may be venial, digression is mortal.

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

The stage but echoes back the public voice. / The drama’s laws the drama’s patrons give, / For we that live to please, must please to live.

A play should give you something to think about. When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.

Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington,/Don’t put your daughter on the stage,/The profession is overcrowded/ And the struggle’s pretty tough/ And admitting t he fact/She’s burning to act,/That isn’t quite enough.

I generally avoid temptation unless 1 can’t resist it.

Blessed is he who has never been tempted; for he knows not the frailty of his rectitude.

There is a certain degree of temptation which will overcome any virtue. Now, in so far as you approach temptation to a man, you do him an injury; and, if he is overcome, you share his guilt.

Who will not judge him worthy to be robbed / That sets his doors wide open to a thief, / And shows the felon where his treasure lies?

No temptation can ever be measured by the value of its object.

Intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance, while temperate temperance 'helps it in its fight against intemperate intemperance.

If health and a fair day smile upon me, I am a very good fellow; if a corn trouble my toe, I am sullen, out of humor, and inaccessible.

Certainly there are good and bad times, but our mood changes more often than our fortune.

A human being tends to believe that the mood of the moment, be it troubled or blithe, peaceful or stormy, is the true, native, and permanent tenor of his existence ... whereas the truth is that he is condemned to improvisation and morally lives from hand to mouth all the time.

There is no harbor of peace / From the changing waves of joy and despair.