Quotes to inspire and reflect

No price is set on the lavish summer; / June may be had by the poorest comer.

Summer was made to give you a taste of what hell is like. Winter was made for landladies to charge high rents and keep cold radiators and make a fortune off of poor tenants.

Nobody can keep spring out of Harlem. I stuck my head out the window this morning and spring kissed me bang in the face.

The changing year’s successive plan / Proclaims mortality to man.

There is no season when such pleasant and sunny spots may be lighted on, and produce so pleasant an effect on the feelings, as now in October.

I should like to enjoy this summer flower by flower, as if it were to be the last one for me.

Spring never is Spring unless it comes too soon.

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

Long stormy spring-time, wet contentious April, winter chilling the lap of very May; but at length the season of summer does come.

Autumn wins you best by this, its mute /Appeal to sympathy for its decay.

’Tis said, fantastic ocean doth enfold / The likeness of whate’er on land is seen.

Let us love winter, for it is the spring of genius.

The sea pronounces something, over and over, in a hoarse whisper; I cannot quite make it out.

Implacable I, the implacable Sea; / Implacable most when most I smile serene—/ Pleased, not appeased, by myriad wrecks in me.

Some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it looking old, as if the

The sea—this truth must be confessed—has no generosity. No display of manly qualities—courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness—has ever been known to touch its irresponsible consciousness of power.

For all that has been said of the love that certain natures (on shore) have professed to feel for it, for all the celebrations it has been the object of in prose and song, the sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose, should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself.

One bliss for which / There is no match / Is when you itch / To up and scratch.

If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain’t sleepy—if you are anywheres where it won’t do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.

A Scotchman must be a very sturdy moralist who does not love Scotland better than truth.

Scratching is one of nature’s sweetest gratifications, and nearest at hand.

Religion will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development.

The effort to reconcile science and religion is almost always made, not by theologians, but by scientists unable to shake off altogether the piety absorbed with their mother's milk.

The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide.

Don’t set out to teach theism from your natural history.... You spoil both.

Faith is a fine invention / When Gentlemen can see— / But Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency.

We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy.

Science is the most intimate school of resignation and humility, for it teaches us to bow before the seemingly most insignificant of facts.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; / Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—/We murder to dissect.

The truth is, that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded.

Science has zipped the atom open in a dozen places, it can read the scrawlings on the Rosetta stone as glibly as a literary critic explains Hart Crane, but it doesn’t know anything about playwrights.

Science is always simple and always profound. It is only the half-truths that are dangerous.

Science, by itself, cannot supply us with an ethic. It can show us how to achieve a given end, and it may show us that some ends cannot be achieved.

In art nothing worth doing can be done without genius; in science even a very moderate capacity can contribute to a supreme achievement.

The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have sacrificed his life.

The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live. Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.

Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for man.

The whole history of science has been the gradual realization that events do not happen in an arbitrary manner, but that they reflect a certain underlying order, which may or may not be divinely inspired.

Scientist alone is true poet he gives us the moon / he promises the stars he'll make us a new universe if it comes to that.

Science is the attempt to make the chaotic diversity of our sense-experience correspond to a logically uniform system of thought.

Tis a short sight to limit our faith in laws to those of gravity, of chemistry, of botany, and so forth.

One aim of the physical sciences has been to give an exact picture of the material world. One achievement of physics in the twentieth century has been to prove that that aim is unattainable.

Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal.

Difficulty is a coin the learned make use of like jugglers, to conceal the inanity of their art.

The scholar is early acquainted with every department of the impossible. v

Everything that’s prose isn’t verse and everything that isn’t verse is prose. Now you see what it is to be a scholar!

Don’t appear so scholarly, pray. Humanize your talk, and speak to be understood. Do you think a Greek name gives more weight to your reasons?