Quotes to inspire and reflect

Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.

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.

There is nothing sweeter than to be sympathized with.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stupefaction, when it persists, becomes stupidity.

Surprise is the greatest gift which life can grant us.

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.

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

The supernatural is the natural not yet understood.

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.

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

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

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

Light boats sail swift, though greater hulks draw deep.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week.

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.

Is it sin / To rush into the secret house of death / Ere death dare come to us?

Razors pain you; / Rivers are damp; / Acids stain you; / And drugs cause cramp. / Guns aren’t lawful; / Nooses give; / Gas smells awful; /You might as well live.

Why dost thou complain of this world? It detains thee not; thy own cowardice is the cause, if thou livest in pain.

No sane society chooses to commit national suicide.

If life’s a joke, then suicide’s a bad punch line.

He who saves a man against his will as good as murders him.

The question is whether [suicide] is the way out, or the way in.

Comedians are the nearest to suicide.

There is satiety in all things, in sleep, and love- making, / in the loveliness of singing and the innocent dance.

That is what chills your spine when you read an account of a suicide: not the frail corpse hanging from the window bars but what happened inside that heart immediately before.