Quotes to inspire and reflect

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

It’s a burden to us even to be human beings—men with our own real body and blood; we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man.

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness—much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable.

Hell is the bloodcurdling mansion of time, in whose profoundest circle Satan himself waits, winding a gargantuan watch in his hand.

If you mean to keep as well as possible, the less you think about your health the better.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or, to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.

A child shows gratitude the way a woman/Shows she likes a pretty dress—/Puts it on and takes it off again—

The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.

Government and co-operation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.

Talent is a very common family trait; genius belongs rather to individuals—just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but rarely a whole brood of either.

Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.

A person of genius should marry a person of character. Genius does not herd with genius.

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

One cannot help using his early friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress.

Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies.

[I]t is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

You canna expect to be baith grand and comfortable.

A wise man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but he bows to the authority of a particular fact.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

Even though a god, I have learned to obey the times.

No one can shed light on vices he does not have or afflictions he has never experienced.

Naked I came into the world, naked I shall go out of it! And a very good thing too, for it reminds me that I am naked under my shirt, whatever its colour.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.

Every person’s feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

Wilt Thou not take the doubt of Thy children whom the time commands to try all things in the place of the unquestioning faith of earlier generations?

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

When I feel inclined to read poetry I take down my Dictionary. The poetry of words is quite as beautiful as that of sentences. The author may arrange the gems effectively, but their shape and lustre have been given by the attrition of ages.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.

How True it is that our destinies are decided by nothings and that a small imprudence helped by some insignificant accident, as an acorn is fertilized by a drop of rain, may raise the trees on which perhaps we and others shall be crucified.

In despair there are the most intense enjoyments, especially when one is very acutely conscious of the hopelessness of one’s position.

To be always ready a man must be able to cut a knot, for everything cannot be untied.

The masses are the material of democracy, but its form—that is to say, the laws which express the general reason, justice, and utility—can only be rightly shaped by wisdom, which is by no means a universal property.

What once was cuddled must learn to kiss/The cold worm’s mouth. That’s all the mystery.

Most persons have died before they expire—died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.

What the mulberry leaf is to the silkworm, the author’s book, treatise, essay, poem, is to the critical larvae that feed upon it. It furnishes them with food and clothing.

We are all like Scheherazade’s husband, in that we want to know what happens next.

Although the novel exercises the rights of a created object, criticism has not those rights, and too many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own detriment as important edifices.