Quotes to inspire and reflect

Social prosperity means man happy, the citizen free, the nation great.

When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

The taste for well-being is the prominent and indelible feature of democratic times.

Some men never find prosperity, / For all their voyaging, / While others find it with no voyaging.

If prosperity is regarded as the reward of virtue it will be regarded as the symptom of virtue.

Happiness seems to require a modicum of external prosperity.

Politeness requires this thing; decorum that; ceremony has its forms, and fashion its laws, and these we must always follow, never the promptings of our own nature.

They who prosper take on airs of vanity.

Ceremony forbids us to express by words things that are lawful and natural, and we obey it; reason forbids us to do things unlawful and ill, and nobody obeys it.

A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility.

Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate.

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.

What good is*a planet called Earth, after all, if you own no land?

The first man to fence in a piece of land, saying “This is mine,’’ and who found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.

The spirit of property doubles a man’s strength.

No man divulges his revenue, or at least which way it comes in: but every one publishes his acquisitions.

It should be remembered that the foundation of the social contract is property; and its first condition, that every one should be maintained in the peaceful possession of what belongs to him.

Where there is no property there is no injustice.

What we call real estate—the solid ground to build a house on—is the broad foundation on which nearly all the guilt of this world rests.

Men honor property above all else; / it has the greatest power in human life.

If a man own land, the land owns him. Now let him leave home, if he dare.

It is not the possessions but the desires of mankind which require to be equalized.

Man is a creature who lives not upon bread alone, but principally by catchwords; and the little rift betwen the sexes is astonishingly widened by simply teaching one set of catchwords to the girls and another to the boys.

Why is propaganda so much more successful when it stirs up hatred than when it tries to stir up friendly feeling?

I give you bitter pills in sugar coating. The pills are harmless; the poison is in the sugar.

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

To make a vow for life is to make oneself a slave.

He that promises too much means nothing.

Better break your word than do worse in keeping it.

Promises are not to be kept, if the keeping of them would prove harmful to those to whom you have made them.

A promise is binding in the inverse ratio of the numbers to whom it is made.

Accursed from birth they be / Who seek to find monogamy, / Pursuing it from bed to bed— / I think they would be better dead.

We have our arts, the ancients had theirs.... We cannot raise obelisks a hundred feet high in a single piece, but our meridians are more exact.

All progress means war with Society.

The policy of man consists, at first, in endeavoring to arrive at a state equal to that of animals, whom nature has furnished with food, clothing, and shelter.

The magnitude of a "progress" is gauged by the greatness of the sacrifice that it requires.

The desire to understand the world and the desire to reform it are the two great engines of progress, without which human society would stand still or retrogress.

Progress—progress is the dirtiest word in the language—who ever told us— / And made us believe it—that to take a step forward was necessarily, was always / A good idea?

Whatever there be of progress in life comes not through adaptation but through daring, through obeying the blind urge.

Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration.

There can be no progress if people have no faith in tomorrow.

The natural progress of the works of men is from rudeness to convenience, from convenience to elegance, and from elegance to nicety.

The distance from nothing to a little, is ten thousand times more, than from it to the highest degree in this life.

The most powerful drive in the ascent of man is his pleasure in his own skill. He loves to do what he does well and, having done it well, he loves to do it better.

Smooth runs the water where the brook is deep.

Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow; / He who would search for pearls must dive below.

There’s no one so transparent as the person who thinks he’s devilish deep.