Quotes to inspire and reflect

Sufficiency’s enough for men of sense.

Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark, / And shares the nature of infinity.

Suffering is one very long moment. We can not divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods and chronicle their return.

Hearts live by being wounded.

The pain seemed to be displacing with its own hairy segments his heart and lungs; as its grip swelled in his throat he felt he was holding his brain like a morsel on a platter high out of hungry reach.

Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation.

If pain could have cpred us we should long ago have been saved.

Perhaps the worst thing about suffering is that it finally hardens the hearts of those around it.

Man never reasons so much and becomes so introspective as when he suffers; since he is anxious to get at the cause of his sufferings, to learn who has produced them, and whether it is just or unjust that he should have to bear them.

To a great extent, suffering is a sort of need felt by the organism to make itself familiar with a new state, which makes it uneasy, to adapt its sensibility to that state.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

We are more sensible of one little touch of a surgeon’s lancet than of twenty wounds with a sword in the heat of fight.

To be good we must needs have suffered; but perhaps it is necessary to have caused suffering before we can become better.

Beauty cannot disguise nor music melt / A pain undiagnosable but felt.

At some point, you no longer feel pain. Sensation disappears and reason is dulled, until you lose all grasp of time and place.

Much of your pain is self-chosen. / It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.

Pain, indolence, sterility, endless ennui have also their lesson for you, if you are great.

A Wounded Deer—leaps highest.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by-the appalling total of human suffering; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow and without intellectual revelation.

Who, except the gods, / can live time through forever without any pain?

It is infinitely easier to suffer in obedience to a human command than to accept suffering as free, responsible men.

Success is not greedy, as people think, but insignificant. That’s why it satisfies nobody.

For sufferers it is sweet to know before-hand clearly the pain that still remains for them.

Unless a man has been taught what to do with success after getting it, the achievement of it must inevitably leave him a prey to boredom.

When men succeed, even their neighbors think them wise.

Success / for the striver washes away the effort of striving.

Success abides longer among men / when it is planted by the hand of God.

The way to rise is to obey and please.

Failure makes people bitter and cruel. Success improves the character of the man.

Some men succeed by what they know; some by what they do; and a few by what they are. .

The Way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it.

The compensation of a very early success is a conviction that life is a romantic matter. In the best sense one stays young.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Premature success gives one an almost mystical conception of destiny as opposed to will power—at its worst the Napoleonic delusion.

According to success do we gain a reputation for judgment.

A man who raises himself by degrees to wealth and power, contracts, in the course of this protracted labor, habits of prudence and restraint which he cannot afterwards shake off. A man cannot gradually enlarge his mind as he does his house.

There be many wise men that have secret hearts and transparent countenances.

He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher.

The most important things must be said simply, for they are spoiled by bombast; whereas trivial things must be described grandly, for they are supported only by aptness of expression, tone and manner.

1 might say that what amateurs call a style is usually only the unavoidable awkwardness in first trying to make something that has not heretofore been made.

Manner is all in all, whate’er is writ, / The substitute for genius, sense, and wit.

If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.

Epithets, like pepper, / Give zest to what you write; / And if you strew them sparely, / They whet the appetite: / But if you lay them on too thick, / You spoil the matter quite!

Persons of slender intellectual stamina dread competition, as dwarfs are afraid of being run over in the street.

He that makes himself an ass must not take it ill if men ride him.

Idiot, n. A member of a large and powerful tribe whose influence in human affairs has always been dominant and controlling.

With stupidity and sound digestion man may front much.