Quotes to inspire and reflect

What 1 seem to do, thought Herzog, is to inflame myself with my drama, with ridicule, failure, denunciation, distortion, to inflame myself voluptuously, esthetically, until I reach sexual climax. And that climax looks like a resolution and an answer to many “higher" problems.

She transformed his miseries into sexual excitements and, to give credit where it was due, turned his grief in a useful direction.

Desire is poison at lunch and wormwood at dinner; your bed is a stone, friendship is hateful and your fancy is always fixed on one thing.

Sexuality is the lyricism of the masses.

A sewer is a cynic. It tells All.

Nothing comes of severity if there be no leanings towards a change of heart. And if there be natural leanings towards a change of heart, what need for severity?

If you hit a pony over the nose at the outset of your acquaintance, he may not love you, but he will take a deep interest in your movements ever afterwards.

All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil.

Slavery holds few men fast; the greater number hold fast their slavery.

No man is good enough to be another man’s master.

Coercion created slavery, the cowardice of the slaves perpetuated it.

Slaves lose everything in their chains, even the desire of escaping from them.

Art thou less a slave by being loved and favoured by thy master? Thou art indeed well off, slave. Thy master favours thee; he will soon beat thee.

This is a world of compensation; and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, cannot long retain it.

Freedom is indivisible, and when one man is enslaved, all are not free.

Whatever day / Makes man a slave, takes half his worth away.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

This is what it means / to be a slave: to be abused and bear it, / compelled by violence to suffer wrong.

To oblige persons often costs little and helps much.

He who is by nature not his own but another’s man, is by nature a slave.

Verily the kindness that gazes upon itself in a mirror turns to stone, / And a good deed that calls itself by tender names becomes the parent to a curse.

The man who confers a favour would rather not be repaid in the same coin.

“Let me light my lamp," / says the star, / “And never debate / if it will help to remove the darkness.”

All service ranks the same with God— / With God, whose puppets, best and worst, / Are we: there is no last nor'first.

Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

Solemnity is the shield of idiots.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human.

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest, good men.

Every man is grave alone.

Oh, that ludicrous virile earnestness!

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

I hope my tongue in prune juice smothers / If I belittle dogs and mothers.

Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.

He could distinguish the approach of Milly like that of a police car from a long way off. Whistles instead of sirens warned him of her coming.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.

Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.

Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.

The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers / Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.

Devils can be driven out of the heqrt by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man.

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

What can give us surer knowledge than our senses? With what else can we better distinguish the true from the false?

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odour.

The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.