Quotes to inspire and reflect

The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy.

Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it in hiding.

Society soon grows used to any state of things which is imposed upon it without explanation.

A great society is a society in which its men of business think greatly of their functions.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment: it must stand or fall by its results.

Every social system is more or less against nature, and at every moment nature is at work to reclaim her rights.

Society itself is an accident to the spirit, and if society in any of its forms is to be justified morally it must be justified at the bar of the individual conscience.

What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unlimited right to everything he tries to get and succeeds in getting; what he gains is civil liberty and the proprietorship of all he possesses.

In civilized communities men’s idiosyncrasies are mitigated by the necessity of conforming to certain rules of behaviour. Culture, is a mask that hides their faces.

Necessity reconciles and brings men together; and this accidental connection afterward forms itself into laws.

In civilized society we all depend upon each other, and our happiness is very' much owing to the good opinion of mankind.

Time and time again I have been persuaded that a huge potential of goodwill is slumbering within our society. It’s just that it's incoherent, suppressed, confused, crippled and perplexed.

In the mouth of Society are many diseased teeth, decayed to the bones of the jaws. But Society makes no effort to have them extracted and be rid of the affliction. It contents itself with gold fillings.

Human life in common is only made possible when a majority comes together which is stronger than any separate individual and which remains united against all separate individuals.

Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts.

The power that keeps cities of men together / Is noble preservation of law.

No scheme for a change of society can be made to appear immediately palatable, except by falsehood, until society has become so desperate that it will accept any change.

Society is immoral and immortal; it can afford to commit any kind of folly, and indulge in any sort of vice; it cannot be killed, and the fragments that survive can always laugh at the dead.

What the collectivist age wants, allows, and approves is the perpetual holiday from the self.

Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.

Levellers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear levelling up to themselves.

All the people like us are We, / And every one else is They.

There was a certain inner comfort in knowing he could knock down anybody who was snooty toward him, although, being very shy and a throughly nice boy, he never fought except in the gym.

Men hate the haughty of heart who will not be / the friend of every man.

Next to “I win,” “I told you so” are the sweetest words.

In Sleep we lie all naked and alone, in Sleep we are united at the heart of night and darkness, and we are strange and beautiful asleep; for we are dying in the darkness, and we know no death.

We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.

Sleep does make us all equal, it seems to me, like his big brother—Death.

Then blessings on thee, my afternoon torpor/Thou makest a prince of a mental porpor.

Cut if you will, with Sleep’s dull knife, / Each day to half its length, my friend,—/ The years that Time takes off my life, / He’ll take off the other end!

Even where sleep is concerned, too much is a bad thing.

For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.

Sleep is pain’s easiest salve, and doth fulfill / All offices of death, except to kill.

Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep. It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak.

Sleep hath its own world, / And a wide realm of wild reality, / And dreams in their development have breath, / And tears, and tortures, and the touch of Joy.

Strike at a great man, and you will not miss.

Folk whose own behavior is most ridiculous are always to the fore in slandering others.

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

There is nothing that more betrays a base ungenerous spirit than the giving of secret stabs to a man’s reputation. Lampoons and satires, that are written with wit and spirit, are like poisoned darts, which not only inflict a wound, but make it incurable.

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

When all beliefs are challenged together, the just and necessary ones have a chance to step forward and to re-establish themselves alone.

There’s some end at last for the man who follows a path: mere rambling is interminable.

Doubt is an element of criticism, and the tendency of criticism is necessarily skeptical.

As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas.

A straight path never leads anywhere except to the objective.

[H]ard as I try, daddy-o, I really do not like concert singers. They are always singing in some foreign language.

I only desire sincere relations with the worthiest of my acquaintance, that they may give me an opportunity once in a year to speak the truth.