Quotes to inspire and reflect

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

About 60 years ago, I said to my father, “Old Mr. Senex is showing his age; he sometimes talks quite stupidly.” My father replied, “That isn’t age. He’s always been stupid. He is just losing his ability to conceal it.”

La lutte elle-même vers les sommets suffit à remplir un coeur d’homme. Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux .

N’attendez pas le jugement dernier. Il a lieu tous les jours .

I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.

A man first quarrels with his father about three-quarters of a year before he is born.

France, mother of arts, of warfare, and of laws.

[ Explaining why he did not consult his father, former President George H. W. Bush, on the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003 :] There is a higher father that I appeal to.

What do girls do who haven’t any mothers to help them through their troubles?

Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears.

We are not certain, we are never certain. If we were, we could reach some conclusions, and we could, at last, make others take us seriously.

At the bottom of all the tributes paid to democracy is the little man, walking into the little booth, with a little pencil, making a little cross on a little bit of paper—no amount of rhetoric or voluminous discussion can possibly diminish the overwhelming importance of the point.

How could sincerity be a condition of friendship? A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.

We call first truths those we discover after all the others.

There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something.

There’s so much horseshit about babies; schools change every ten years. [My sister] raised a couple of nice ones by forcing them to be considerate or leave the room.... I think people act the way they’re expected to act.

The cure for false theology is motherwit. Forget your books and traditions, and obey your moral perceptions at this hour.

The journey over the bridge had unnerved me. The river water passed me by like an untouched drink. I suspected that even if my mother and brother had not been there I would have made no move to jump.

His mother, her eyes raised to heaven, hands arched before her, moving, made real for John that patience, that endurance, that long suffering, which he had read of in the Bible and found so hard to imagine.

A deep distress hath humanised my Soul.

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

Our genes keep unfolding as long as we live. Harry tastes in his teeth a sourness that offended him on his father’s breath. Poor Pop. His face yellowed like a dried apricot at the end.

Any father whose son raises his hand against him is guilty: of having produced a son who raised his hand against him.

How easily a father's tenderness is recalled, and how quickly a son’s offenses vanish at the slightest word of repentance!

Greatness of name in the father oftentimes overwhelms the son; they stand too near one another. The shadow lulls the growth.

There must always be a struggle between a father and son, while one aims at power and the other at independence.

Few sons, indeed, are like their fathers. Generally they are worse; but just a few are better.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

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.

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

We can t do without dominating others or being served. ... Even the man on the bottom rung still has his wife, or his child. If he’s a bachelor, his dog. The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.

A woman wishes to mother a man simply because she sees into his helplessness, his need of an amiable environment, his touching self-delusion.

Now, we’ve made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

All the critics in the world may say it’s good but a man’s own mother will know.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols—all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child’s authentic self to a parent’s needs.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.

If you and your child were going to be lulled tomorrow/would you not give him to eat today?

A kiss, when all is said, what is it? / An oath that’s given closer than before; / A promise more precise; the sealing of / Confessions that till then were barely breathed; / A rosy dot placed on the i in loving.

Italy, and the spring and first love all together should suffice to make the gloomiest person happy.

To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.

Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.

When you deal with your brother, be pleasant, but get a witness.

Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences—all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn't feel it.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

When brothers agfee, no fortress is so strong as their common life.

You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.

Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate.