Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies.

With effervescing opinions, as with the not yet forgotten champagne, the quickest way to let them go flat is to let them get exposed to the air.

After the great destructions / Everyone will prove that he was innocent.

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

We give to necessity the praise of virtue.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.

Our system of morality is a body'of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

When I can look Life in the eyes, / Grown calm and very coldly wise, / Life will have given me the Truth, / And taken in exchange—my youth.

Oh better than the minting / Of a gold-crowned king / Is the safe-kept memory / Of a lovely thing.

Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human.

Man becomes man only by the intelligence, but he is man only by the heart.

Take love when love is given, / But never think to find it / A sure escape from sorrow / Or a complete repose.

O, beauty, are you not enough? / Why am I crying after love?

We must resemble each other a little in order to understand each other, but we must be a little different to love each other.

Love is a great force in private life; it is indeed the greatest of all things; but love in public affairs does not work.

In order to love simply, it is necessary to know how to show love.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game.

We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to, in virtue of our endowments.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.

Life is a frail moth flying / Caught in the web of the years that pass.

Now at last I have come to see what life is, / Nothing is ever ended, everything only begun, / And the brave victories that seem so splendid / Are never really won.

The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed, and which disturbs repose of mind, than to fall in love with novelties.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy. In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

Beware of the community in which blasphemy does not exist: underneath, atheism runs rampant.

Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.

The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

Little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line.

No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well,—parent, child, brother, sister, intimate.

Inventors and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try' to be “consistent.”

There never was an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect.

We must not roughly smash other people’s idols because we know, or think we know, that they are of cheap human manufacture.

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great