Quotes to inspire and reflect

Oh, my friends, that your self be in your deed as the mother is in her child - let that be your word concerning virtue!

Youth's longing misconceived inconsistency.Those whom I deemedChanged to my kin, the friends of whom I dreamed,Have aged and lost our old affinity:One has to change to stay akin to me.

Our faith in others betrays that we would rather have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer. And often with our love we want merely to overcome envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable.

You know these things as thoughts, but your thoughts are not your experiences, they are an echo and after-effect of your experiences: as when your room trembles whe na carriage goes past. I however am sitting in the carriage, and often I am the carriage itself.Ina man who thinks like this, the dichotomy between thinking and feeling, intellect and passion, has really disappeared. He feels his thoughts. He can fall in love with an idea. An idea can make him ill.

In music the passions enjoy themselves.

It is true: we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving.There is always a certain madness in love. But also there is always a certain method in madness.

I consist of body and soul - in the worlds of a child. And why shouldn't we speak like children? But the enlightened, the knowledgeable would say: I am body through and through, nothing more; and the soul is just a word for something on the body.

Among such persons are those women who transform themselves into just that function of a man that is but weakly developed in him, and then become his purse, or his politics, or his social intercourse. Such beings maintain themselves best when they insert themselves in an alien organism; if they do not succeed they become vexed, irritated, and eat themselves up.

A childlike man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle aged habit and convention.

For which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?

A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent a pleasure. I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

We loved with a love that was more than love.

In some families, please is described as the magic word. In our house, however, it was sorry.

When everything is astonishing, nothing is astonishing; this is how the world is to children.

A child is the root of the heart.

One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.

It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

Old age lives minutes slowly, hours quickly; childhood chews hours and swallows minutes.

Maturity means reacquiring the seriousness one had as a child at play.

I seem to have been like a child playing on the sea shore, finding now and then a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay undiscovered before me.

A good conscience is a continual Christmas.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Every man regards his own life as the New Year’s Eve of time.

The great man is he who does not lose his child-heart.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them: those we spent with a favorite book.

The madness of love is the greatest of heaven's blessings.

He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets, reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.

Enthusiasm is a volcano on whose top never grows the grass of hesitation.

Whoever, in middle age, attempts to realize the wishes and hopes of his early youth, invariably deceives himself.

In the dissolution of sentimental partnerships it is seldom that both associates are able to withdraw their funds at the same time.

There is a rhythm to the ending of a marriage just like the rhythm of a courtship—only backward. You try to start again but get into blaming over and over. Finally you are both worn out, exhausted, hopeless. Then lawyers are called in to pick clean the corpses.

A divorce is like an amputation; you survive, but there’s less of you.

Someone has said that conversation is sex for the soul.

The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter into another!

The passions that motivate you may change, but it is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction.

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.

A man’s kiss is his signature.

A man falls in love through his eyes, a woman through her imagination, and then they both speak of it as an affair of “the heart.”

Just as we outgrow a pair of trousers, we outgrow acquaintances, libraries, principles, etc., at times before they’re worn out and at times—and this is the worst of all—before we have new ones.

A kiss, when all is said, what is it? An oath sworn nearer by; a promise made With greater certainty; a vow which seeks To make itself more binding; a rosy dot Placed on the “i” in loving; ’tis a secret Told to the mouth instead of to the ear.

IT IS DIFFICULT TO KNOW AT WHAT MOMENT LOVE BEGINS; IT IS LESS DIFFICULT TO KNOW THAT IT HAS BEGUN.

For most of my reading I go back to the old ones – for comfort.

LOVE IS WHAT HAPPENS TO A MAN AND WOMAN WHO DON’T KNOW EACH OTHER.

There is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather.

A timid person is frightened before a danger, a coward during the time, and a courageous person afterward.

The place of the father in the modern suburban family is a very small one, particularly if he plays golf.