Quotes to inspire and reflect

Sanity is a madness put to good uses; waking life is a dream controlled.

Our health is our sound relation to external objects; our sympathy with external being.

Souls are not saved in bundles.

What is most contrary to salvation is not sin but habit.

Sanctity and genius are as rebellious as vice.

As life draws nearer to its end, I feel more and more clearly that it will not matter in the least, at the last day, what form of religion a man has professed—nay, that many who have never even heard of Christ, will in that day find themselves saved by His blood.

Grace is indeed needed to turn a man into a saint; and he who doubts it does not know what a saint or a man is.

It is easier to make a saint out of a libertine than out of a prig.

I’m an alcoholic. I’m a drug addict. I’m homosexual. I’m a genius. Of course, I could be all four of these dubious things and still be a saint. But I shonuf ain’t no saint yet, nawsuh. v

He [Gandhi] was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries.

There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea.

The happiest hour a sailor sees / Is when he’s down / At an inland town, / With his Nancy on his knees, yo ho! / And his arm around her waist!

Ports are necessities, like postage stamps or soap, / but they seldom seem to care what impressions they make.

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the days, weeks, and months fall away quicker into the past. They seem to be left astern as easily as the light air- bubbles in the swirls of the ship’s wake.

Only he can understand what a farm is, what a country is, who shall have sacrificed part of himself to his farm or country.

Nothing so much enhances a good as to make sacrifices for it.

Where else, in a non-totalitarian country, but in the political profession is the individual expected to sacrifice all—including his own career—for the national good?

Sacrifice may be a Bower that virtue will pluck on its road, but it was not to gather this Bower that virtue set forth on its travels.

The very act of sacrifice magnifies the one who sacrifices himself to the point where his sacrifice is much more costly to humanity than would have been

Drown not thyself to save a drowning man.

Ideas in modern Russia are machine-cut blocks coming in solid colors; the nuance is outlawed, the interval walled up, the curve grossly stepped.

Sabbath, n. A weekly festival having its origin in the fact that God made the world in six days and was arrested on the seventh.

Don’t you forget what’s divine in the Russian soul—and that’s resignation.

Rumor goes forth at once, Rumor than whom / No other speedier evil thing exists; / She thrives by rapid movement, and acquires / Strength as she goes; small at the first from fear, / She presently uplifts herself aloft, / And stalks upon the ground and hides her head / Among the clouds.

Rumor is a pipe / Blown by surmises, jealousies, conjectures.

Rumour doth double, like the voice and echo, / The numbers of the feared.

The important thing is to abide by the rule of threes. Either you see a woman three times in quick succession and then never again, or you maintain relations over the years but make sure that the rendezvous are at least three weeks apart.

There is no useful rule without an exception.

In reading and writing, you cannot lay down rules until you have learnt to obey them. Much more so in life.

No rule is so general, which admits not some exception.

If you have but a single ruler, you lie at the discretion of a master who has no reason to love you: and if you have several, you must bear at once their tyranny and their divisions.

Within the hollow crown / That rounds the mortal temples of a king / Keeps Death his court.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

The power of kings is founded on the reason and on the folly of the people, and specially on their folly.

Whom hatred frights, / Let him not dream on sovereignty.

We owe subjection and obedience to all our kings, whether good or bad, alike, for that has respect unto their office; but as to esteem and affection, these are only due to their virtue.

The subject’s love is the king’s best guard.

Power educates the potentate.

Princes are like heavenly bodies, which cause good or evil times, and which have much veneration, but no rest.

If men think that a ruler is religious and has a reverence for the Gods, they are less afraid of suffering injustice at his hands.

Every ruler is harsh whose rule is new.

Spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing.

A man must have very eminent qualities to hold his own without being polite.

Folly often goes beyond her bounds>but impudence knows none.

Routine is the god of every social system; it is the seventh heaven of business, the essential component in the success of every factory, the ideal of every statesman. The social machine should run like clockwork.

Royalty does good and is badly spoken of.

It is not irregular hours or irregular diet that make the romantic life.

Is not this the true romantic feeling—not to desire to escape life, but to prevent life from escaping you?