Quotes to inspire and reflect

In most cases, when the lion, weary of obeying its master, has torn and devoured him, its nerves are pacified and it looks round for another master before whom to grovel.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder.

Revolt is the violence of an entire people; rebellion the unruliness of an individual or an uprising by a minority; both are spontaneous and blind. Revolution is both planned and spontaneous, a science and an art.

Women hate revolutions and revolutionists. They like men who are docile, and well-regarded at the bank, and never late at meals.

To revolutionaries the significant reality is the world which they are fighting to bring about, not the world they are fighting to overcome.

It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.

We live in a hemisphere whose own revolution has given birth to the most powerful force of the modern age—the search for the freedom and self-fulfillment of man.

Revolutionaries are rarely motivated primarily by material considerations—though the illusion that they are persists in the West.

The wind of revolutions is not tractable.

If the abuse be enormous, nature will rise up, and claiming her original rights, overturn a corrupt political system.

Though a revolution may call itself “national,” it always marks the victory of a single party.

Everywhere revolutions are painful yet fruitful gestations of a people: they shed blood but create light, they eliminate men but elaborate ideas.

The Keynesian Revolution occurred at the moment in history when other change had made it indispensable

A non-violent revolution is not a program of seizure of power. It is a program of transformation of relationships, ending in a peaceful transfer of power.

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era.

Plots, true or false, are necessary things, / To raise up commonwealths, and ruin kings.

The overwhelming pressure of mediocrity, sluggish and indomitable as a glacier, will mitigate the most violent, and depress the most exalted revolution.

The revolutionary spirit is mighty convenient in this, that it frees one from all scruples as regards ideas.

Revolutions are not made by fate but by men.

Inferiors revolt in order that they may be equal, and equals that they may be superior.

If there be fuel prepared, it is hard to tell whence the spark shall come that shall set it on fire.

Let us leave every man at liberty to seek into him- self'and to lose himself in his ideas.

Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.

[0]ur children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.

Thought is the labour of the intellect, reverie is its pleasure.

God will not punish the man / Who makes return for an injury.

Revenge is always the joy of narrow, / Sick, and petty minds.

This is sweet: to see your foe / perish and pay to justice all he owes.

It is difficult to fight against anger; for a man will buy revenge with his soul.

Men regard it as their right to return evil for evil— and, if they cannot, feel they have lost their liberty.

Instead of complaining that God had hidden Himself, you will give Him thanks for having revealed so much of Himself.

My own mind is the direct revelation which I have from God and far least liable to mistake in telling his will of any revelation.

There is a sort of transcendental ventriloquy through which men can be made to believe that something which was said on earth came from heaven.

The laws of changeless justice bind / Oppressor and oppressed; / And, close as sin and suffering joined, / We march to Fate abreast.

God gives each his due at the time allotted.

He who makes his law a curse, / By his own law shall surely die.

To withdraw is not to run away, and to stay is no wise action, when there’s more reason to fear than to hope.

I am Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from.

Dismiss the old horse in good time, lest he fail in the lists and the spectators laugh.

Never have I been able to settle in life. Always seated askew, as if on the arm of a chair; ready to get up, to leave.

I' would like to sit still for a while but I'm restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness.

A wanderer is man from his birth. / He was born in a ship / On the breast of the river of Time.

Rest is the sauce of labor.

In all things rest is sweet; there is sur feit / even in honey, even in Aphrodite’s lovely flowers.

Nothing gives rest but the sincere search for truth.

A burden in the bush is worth two on your hands.

Too much rest itself becomes a pain.