Quotes to inspire and reflect

Taking sides is the beginning of sincerity, and earnestness follows shortly afterwards, and the human being becomes a bore.

All service ranks the same with God— / With God, whose puppets, best and worst, / Are we: there is no last nor'first.

Solemnity is the shield of idiots.

A human action becomes genuinely important when it springs from the soil of a clearsighted awareness of the temporality and the ephemerality of everything human.

Every man is grave alone.

There is ever a slight suspicion of the burlesque about earnest, good men.

A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn’t know the market price of any single thing.

Oh, that ludicrous virile earnestness!

Sentimentality is only sentiment that rubs you up the wrong way.

Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.

Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.

He could distinguish the approach of Milly like that of a police car from a long way off. Whistles instead of sirens warned him of her coming.

How much more sensuality invites to art than does sentimentality.

Moral qualities rule the world, but at short distances the senses are despotic.

The heart that is soonest awake to the flowers / Is always the first to be touched by the thorns.

Nothing is little to him that feels it with great sensibility.

Devils can be driven out of the heqrt by the touch of a hand on a hand, or a mouth on a mouth.

The great man, that is, the man most imbued with the spirit of the time, is the impressionable man.

Seeing, hearing, feeling, are miracles, and each part and tag of me is a miracle.

We are astonished at thought, but sensation is equally wonderful.

What can give us surer knowledge than our senses? With what else can we better distinguish the true from the false?

The loss of a sense adds as much beauty to the world as its acquisition.

Nothing awakens a reminiscence like an odour.

The air was so sweet in New Orleans it seemed to come in soft bandannas; and you could smell the river and really smell the people, and mud, and molasses, and every kind of tropical exhalation, with your nose suddenly removed from the dry ices of a Northern winter.

The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition.

Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.

We never reflect how pleasant it is to ask for nothing.

The most affluent man is he that confronts all the shows he sees by equivalents out of the stronger wealth of himself.

Now I know the things I know, / And do the things I do; / And if you do not like me so, / To hell, my love, with you!

Any man who is really a man must learn to be alone in the midst of others, to think alone for others, and, if necessary, against others.

Independence is for the very few; it is a privilege of the strong.

I care not so much what I am in the opinion of others, as what I am in my own; I would be rich of myself, and not by borrowing.

A learned man is not learned in all things; but a sufficient man is sufficient throughout, even to ignorance itself.

A wise man never loses anything if he have himself.

Be yourself and think for yourself; and while your conclusions may not be infallible they will be nearer right than the conclusions forced upon you by those

Who / cannot resolve upon a moment’s notice / To live his own life, he forever lives / A slave to others.

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the Kingdom of Heaven, rather than without.

When I speak to you about myself, I am speaking to you about yourself. How is it you don’t see that?

His Cheek is his Biographer—/ As long as he can blush.

Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood or appreciated.

It is not love we should have painted as blind, but self-love.

Self-love is the instrument of our preservation; it resembles the provision for the perpetuity of mankind; it is necessary, it is dear to us, it gives us pleasure, and we must conceal it.

We believe, first and foremost, what makes us feel that we are fine fellows.

One must learn to love oneself ... with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

We prefer ourselves to others, only because w^e have a more intimate consciousness and confirmed opinion of our own claims and merits than of any other person’s.