Quotes to inspire and reflect

Religion in its humility restores man to his only dignity, the courage to live by grace.

It is rash to intrude upon the piety of others: both the depth and the grace of it elude the stranger.

Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and goodness.

Piety with some people, but especially with women, is either a passion, or an infirmity of age, or a fashion which must be followed.

The best way to see divine light is to put out thy own candle.

Fear God, and where you go men shall think they walk in hallowed cathedrals.

There is nothing, I think, more unfortunate than to have soft, chubby, fat-looking children who go to watch their school play basketball every Saturday and regard that as their week’s exercise.

Oh, the wild joys of living! the leaping from rock up to rock, / The strong rending of boughs from the fir-tree, the cool silver shock / Of the plunge in a pool’s living water.

There was a group of Americans taking photographs. “What barbarians!’’ said Papa. “They take photographs so that they do not have to look.”

For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? To the designer of the camera? to the finger on the button? to the law of averages?

Philosophy begins in wonder. And, at the end, when philosophic thought has done its best, the wonder remains.

Every philosophy is tinged with the colouring of some secret imaginative background, which never emerges explicitly into its trains of reasoning.

All the persecutors declare against each other mortal war, while the philosopher, oppressed by them all, contents himself with pitying them.

When one man speaks to another man who doesn’t understand him, and when the man who’s speaking no longer understands, it's metaphysics.

The various opinions of philosophers have scattered through the world as many plagues of the mind as Pandora's box did those of the body; only with this difference, that they have not left hope at the bottom.

That’s why I love philosophy: no one wins.

Philosophers are as jealous as women; each wants a monopoly of praise.

At best, the true philosopher can fulfil his mission very imperfectly, which is to pilot himself, or at most a few voluntary companions who may find themselves in the same boat.

For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline, and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy.

Philosophers, for the most part, are constitutionally timid, and dislike the unexpected. Few of them would be genuinely happy as pirates or burglars. Accordingly they invent systems which make the future calculable, at least in its main outlines.

Ethical metaphysics is fundamentally an attempt, however disguised, to give legislative force to our own wishes.

To make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.

A married philosopher belongs to comedy.

Philosophers.—We are full of things which take us out of ourselves.

Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry the progress, ignorance the end.

Philosophy is such an impertinently litigious lady that a man had as good be engaged in lawsuits as have to do with her.

It has been said that metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct.

Metaphysics is almost always an attempt to prove the incredible by an appeal to the unintelligible.

Pretend what we may, the whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions.

You can’t do without philosophy, since everything has its hidden meaning which we must know.

What is it to be a philosopher? Is it not to be prepared against events?

Posterity for the philosopher is what the other world is for the religious man.

He that hopes no good fears no ill.

To the mean eye all things are trivial, as certainly as to the jaundiced they are yellow.

The instinct of a man is to pursue everything that flies from him, and to fly from all that pursue him.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

Look round the habitable world: how few / Know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.

Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that he who would act the angel acts the beast.

What rapture, oh, it is to know / A good thing when you see it / And having seen a good thing, oh, / What rapture tis to flee it.

We trifle with, make sport of, and despise those who are attached to us, and follow those that fly from us.

There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.

I see / that everywhere among the race of men / it is the tongue that wins and not the deed.

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

The persuasion of a friend is a strong thing.

Too much zeal offends / where indirection works.

Would you persuade, speak of interest, not of reason.

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument, but in the right word. The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.