Quotes to inspire and reflect

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

Never speak of yourself to others; make them talk about themselves instead: therein lies the whole art of pleasing. Everyone knows it and everyone forgets it.

The art of creation / is older than the art of killing.

A mellowing rigorist is always a much pleasanter object to contemplate than a tightening liberal, as a cold day warming up to 32° Fahrenheit is much more agreeable than a warm one chilling down to the same temperature.

To be too conscious is an illness—a real thoroughgoing illness.

I hate and love. You ask, perhaps, how that can be? / I know not, but I feel the agony.

In the dust where we have buried the silent races and their abominations we have buried so much of the delicate magic of life.

Certainty generally is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.

What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead.

A just cause is not ruined by a few mistakes.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

[Pjeople in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes; their inner as well as their outer life can be exposed.

What refuge is there for the victim who is oppressed with the feeling that there are a thousand new books he ought to read, while life is only long enough for him to attempt to read a hundred?

The people I respect most behave as if they were immortal and as if society was eternal.

Under all that we think, lives all we believe, like the ultimate veil of our spirits.

Beauty more than bitterness / Makes the heart break.

Look for a lovely thing and you will find it, / It is not far— / It never will be far.

Savagely is necessary ever}' four or five hundred years in order to bring the world back to life. Otherwise the world would die of civilization.

Put not your trust in money, but put your money in trust.

There is no object on earth which cannot be looked at from a cosmic point of view.

Thou, O my country, hast thy foolish ways, / Too apt to purr at every stranger’s praise!

No absolute is going to make the lion lie dow'n with the lamb: unless the lamb is inside.

Nothing is so common-place as to wish to be remarkable.

We pay for security with boredom, for adventure with bother.

We are all sentenced to capital punishment for the crime of living, and though the condemned cell of our earthly existence is but a narrow and bare dwelling-place, we have adjusted ourselves to it, and made it tolerably comfortable for the little while we are to be confined in it.

If you try to nail anything down in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail.

 

Art is the flower of life and, as seed, it gives back life.

A deception that elevates us is dearer than a host of low truths.

 

One would need to be already wise, in order to love wisdom.

 

Equations are more important to me because politics is for the present but an equation is something for eternity.

 

It is not the strength of the body that counts, but the strength of the spirit.

The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.

 

Only the flow matters: live and let live, love and let love.

 

Ring out the want, the care, the sin

 

Unless we remember we cannot understand.

 

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

In this life there’s nothing new in dying,

 

Death has made His darkness beautiful with thee.

 

Come, my friends. ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

 

Hogmanay, like all festivals, being but a bank from which we can only draw what we put in.

 

Terror … often arises from a pervasive sense of disestablishment; that things are in the unmaking.

 

“Each man’s soul is his genius.”

It is not what he has, or even what he does which expresses the worth of a man, but what he is.

Honesty pays, but it don’t seem to pay enough to suit a lot of people.

Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

As long as learning is connected with earning, as long as certain jobs can only be reached through exams, so long must we take the examination system seriously. If another ladder to employment was contrived, much so-called education would disappear, and no one would be a penny the stupider.

It is not in doing what you like, but in liking what you do that is the secret of happiness.