Quotes to inspire and reflect

There’s one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude—confidence in self.

Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.

Assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.

It generally happens that assurance keeps an even pace with ability.

Self-trust is the essence of heroism.

Take the place and attitude to which you see your unquestionable right, and all men acquiesce.

[H]aving tried to give pattern to the chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, 1 must come out, I must emerge.

The perfection preached in the Gospels never yet built an empire. Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning.

Every man is correct in asking God why he is stuck with himself, and his rotten luck.

The whole dear notion of one’s own Self—marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self— is a myth.

Man is the creature that cannot emerge from himself, that knows his fellows only in himself; when he asserts the contrary, he is lying.

You live and die according to what goes on in yourself, which no one else can even begin to know, not even father, mother, wife, son, or daughter.

No man would, I think, exchange his existence with any other man, however fortunate. We had as lief not be, as not be ourselves.

Each one is all in all to himself; for being dead, all is dead to him.

It was strange to have no self—to be like a little boy left alone in a big house, who knew that now he could do anything he wanted to do, but found that there was nothing that he wanted to do.

What other dungeon i^ so dark as one's own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!

The spirit is the true self, not that physical figure which can be pointed out by your finger.

So much of our time is preparation, so much is routine, and so much retrospect, that the pith of each man’s genius contracts itself to a very few hours.

One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star.

The ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself.

My care is for myself; / Myself am whole and sole reality.

When the self is one’s exclusive subject and limit, reference and measure, one has no choice but to make a world of words.

Once a woman parts with her virtue, she loses the esteem even of the man whose vows and tears won her to abandon it.

A man can deceive a woman by his sham attachment to her provided he does not have a real attachment elsewhere.

To keep oneself safe does not mean to bury oneself.

Brisk Confidence still best with woman copes: / Pique her and soothe in turn—soon Passion crowns thy hopes.

Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.

Happy he whoe’er, content with the common lot, with safe breeze hugs the shore, and, fearing to trust his skiff to the wider sea, with unambitious oar keeps close to the land.

God Himself is not secure, having given man dominion over His works.

The most beaten paths are certainly the surest; but do not hope to scare up much game on them.

Monopoly or the full control of supply, and hence of price, by a single firm was the ultimate security. But there were many very habitable half-way houses.

Nothing’s as good as holding on to safety.

There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.

Uncertainty and expectation are the joys of life. Security is an insipid thing, and the overtaking and possessing of a wish, discovers the folly of the chase.

At no time are people so sedulously careful to keep their trifling appointments, attend to their ordinary occupations, and thus put a commonplace aspect on life, as when conscious of some secret that if suspected would make them look monstrous in the general eye.

He that communicates his secret to another makes himself that other’s slave.

Would you know secrets? Look for them in grief or pleasure.

A woman only obliges a man to secrecy, that she may have the pleasure of telling herself.

All things on earth point home in old October: sailors to sea, travellers to walls and fences, hunters to field and hollow and the long voice of the hounds, the lover to the love he has forsaken.

Spring, the crudest and fairest of the seasons, will come again. And the strange and buried men will come again, in flower and leaf the strange and buried men will come again, and death and the dust will never come again, for death and the dust will die.

[H]e had heard an inarticulate promise: he had been pierced by Spring, that sharp knife.

In a pleasant spring morning all m^n’s sins are forgiven.

Sing a song of seasons! / Something bright in all! / Flowers in the Summer, / Fires in the Fall.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, / And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

April / Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Winter is cold-hearted, / Spring is yea and nay, / Autumn is a weather-cock / Blown every way. / Summer days for me / When every leaf is on its tree.

What is so rare as a day in June? / Then, if ever, come perfect days; / Then Heaven tries the earth if it be in tune, / And over it softly her warm ear lays.

Wag the world how it will, / Leaves must be green in Spring.