Quotes to inspire and reflect

An absolute silence leads to sadness: it is the image of death.

The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men’s talk than against the expectation of female silence.

Many a time the thing left silent makes for happiness.

By diminishing the value of silence, publicity has also diminished that of language. The two are inseparable: knowing how to speak has always meant knowing how to keep silent, knowing that there are times when one should say nothing.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together, that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the daylight of Life, which they are henceforth to rule.

Do you wish people to believe good of you? Don’t speak.

Your highest female grace is silence.

Silence is sorrow’s best food.

The stillest tongue can be the truest friend.

The words the happy say / Are paltry melody / But those the silent feel / Are beautiful—.

Speech is of time, silence is of eternity.

Silence is all we dread. / There's Ransom in a Voice— / But Silence is Infinity.

When I walk with a camera, I walk from shot to shot, reading the light on a calibrated meter. When I walk without a camera, my own shutter opens, and the moment's light prints on my own silver gut. When

The eye obeys exactly the action of the mind.

I do not find illness an eminence, and I do not understand how people can use it to draw attention to themselves since the attention they draw is nearly always reluctantly given and unpleasantly carried out.

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments.

The diseases which destroy a man are no less natural than the instincts which preserve him.

The sleep of a sick man has keen eyes. / It is a sleep unsleeping.

The sick woman especially: no one surpasses her in refinements for ruling, oppressing, tyrannising.

When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she’s not around, other women must do. Zuckerman was making do with four other women.

Disease makes men more physical, it leaves them nothing but body.

A cough is something that you yourself can’t help, but everybody else does on purpose just to torment you.

A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

How convalescence shrinks a man back to his pristine stature! where is now the space, which he occupied so lately, in his own, in the family’s eye?

There is one topic peremptorily forbidden to all well-bred, to all rational mortals, namely, their distempers. If you have not slept, or if you have slept, or if you have headache, or sciatica, or leprosy, or thunderstroke, I beseech you, by all angels, to hold your peace, and not pollute the morning.

All diseases run into one, old age.

Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, make them so many anatomies.

Can there be worse sickness, than to know / that we are never well, nor can be so?

A ship in dock, surrounded by quays and the walls of warehouses, has the appearance of a prisoner meditating upon freedom in the sadness of a free spirit put under restraint.

A boat to your average woman is just one more damn house to take care of, only it’s more uncomfortable, and the man orders her around like Captain Bligh, and she doesn’t trust the machinery or the plumbing, and she has to walk six blocks to buy groceries or to get the laundry done.

If wisdom were offered me with the proviso that I should keep it shut up and refrain from declaring it, I should refuse. There s no delight in owning anything unshared.

The man that blushes is not quite a brute.

The only shame is to have none.

I never wonder to see men wicked, but I often wonder to see them not ashamed.

Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.

The eyes of men love to pluck / the blossoms; from the faded flowery they turn away.

Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love.

Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible.

I’d call it love if love / didn’t take so many years / but lust too is a jewel.

Some have held the Eye to be / The instrument of lechery, / More furtive than the Hand in low / And vicious venery—Not so! / Its rape is gentle, never more / Violent than a metaphor.

The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reach up into the ultimate pinnacle of his spirit.

When a lady’s erotic life is vexed / God knows what God is coming next.

The body searches for that which has injured the mind with love.

Most creatures have a vague belief that a very precarious hazard, a kind of transparent membrane, divides death from love; and that the profound idea of nature demands that the giver of life should die at the moment of giving.

The old man, especially if he is in society, in the privacy of his thoughts, though he may protest the opposite, never stops believing that, through some singular exception of the universal rule, he can in some unknown and inexplicable way still make an impression on women.

Virginity is now a mere preamble or waiting room to be got out of as soon as possible; it is without significance.

Retrospectively, I would agree with Luis Bunuel that sex without sin is like an egg without salt.

Sex was invented as a biological instrument by (say) the green algae. But as an instrument in the ascent of man which is basic to his cultural evolution, it was invented by man himself.