Quotes to inspire and reflect

The profound thinker always suspects that he is superficial.

Violent pleasures which reach the soul through the body are generally of this sort—they are reliefs of pain.

An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one’s life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.

Not joy but joylessness is the mother of debauchery.

It is the hour to be drunken! To escape being the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunken. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.

More men come to doom / through dirty profits than are kept by them.

The smell of profit is clean / And sweet, whatever the source.

Gain not base gains; base gains are the same as losses.

What is a man if he is not a thief who openly charges as much as he can for the goods he sells?

In large Victorian houses with many rooms and heavy doors, the occupants could be mysterious and exciting to one another in a way that those who live in rackety developments can never hope to be. Not even the lust of a Lord Byron could survive the fact of Levittown.

The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

The personal life of every individual is based on secrecy and perhaps it is partly for that reason that civilized man is so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.

The vilest deeds like poison weeds / Bloom well in prison-air: / It is only what is good in Man / That wastes and withers there: / Pale Anguish keeps the heavy gate, / And the warder is Despair.

I know not whether Laws be right, / Or whether Laws be wrong; / All that we know who lie in gaol / Is that the wall is strong; / And that each day is like a year, / A year whose days are long.

Prison is not a mere physical horror. It is using a pickaxe to no purpose that makes a prison.

Every prison that men build / Is built with bricks of shame, / And bound with bars lest Christ should see / How men their brothers maim.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

It is this refrain that we hear repeated by everyone: you are not at home, this is not a sanatorium, the only exit is by way of the Chimney. (What did it mean? Soon we were all to learn what it meant.)

Ideas and principles that do harm are, as a rule, though not always, cloaks for evil passions.

Manners with fortunes, humours turn with climes, / Tenets with books, and principles with times.

A man may be very sincere in good principles, without having good practice.

General principles are not the less true or important because from their nature they elude immediate observation; they are like the air, which is not the less necessary because we neither see nor feel it.

Men of principle are sure to be bold, but those who are bold may not always be men of principle.

One of the most ordinary weaknesses of the human intellect is to seek to reconcile contrary principles, and to purchase peace at the expense of logic.

Pride is over-estimation of oneself by reason of self-love.

None are more taken in by flattery than the proud, who wish to be the first and are not.

He that is proud eats up himself. Pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle; and whatever praises itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise.

All men who would surpass the other animals should do their best not to pass through life silently like the beasts whom nature made prone, obedient to their bellies.

Pride dwells in the thought; the tongue can have but a very little share in it.

I do not believe that any peacock envies another peacock his tail, because every peacock is persuaded that his own tail is the finest in the world. The consequence of this is that peacocks are peaceable birds.

The truly proud man knows neither superiors nor inferiors. The first he does not admit of—the last he does not concern himself about.

Pride is seldom delicate; it will please itself with very mean advantages.

Pride, perceiving humility honourable, often borrows her cloak.

A proud man is satisfied with his own good opinion, and does not seek to make converts to it.

Pride is said to be the last vice the good man gets clear of.

Pride that dines on vanity sups on contempt.

Pride, avarice, and envy are the tongues men know and heed, a Babel of despair.

It’s a fine thing to rise above pride, but you must have pride in order to do so.

Pretending is a virtue. If you can’t pretend, you can’t be king.

I used to think that once a writer became a man of letters, if only for a half hour, he was done for. And here I am now, at the very moment of such an odious, though respectable, danger.

It is in vain that we get upon stilts, for, once on them, it is still with our legs that we must walk. And on the highest throne in the world we are still sitting on our own ass.

Affectation is an awkward and forced imitation of what should be genuine and easy, wanting the beauty that accompanies what is natural.

Almost every man wastes part of his life in attempts to display qualities which he does not possess, and to gain applause which he cannot keep.

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy, affectation part of the chosen trappings of folly; the one completes a villain, the other only finishes a fop.

Some degree of affection is as necessary to the mind as dress is to the body; we must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.

We all wear some disguise, make some professions, use some artifice, to set ourselves off as being better than we are; and yet it is not denied that we have some good intentions and praiseworthy qualities at bottom.

Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

All human beings have gray little souls—and they all want to rouge them up..