Quotes to inspire and reflect

There is no greater hindrance to the progress of thought than an attitude of irritated party-spirit.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live.

A man doesn't save a century, or a civilization, but a militant party wedded to a principle can.

The less reasonable a cult is, the more men seek to establish it by force.

Party loyalty lowers the greatest men to the petty level of the masses.

No new sect ever had humor; no disciples either, even the disciples of Christ.

He who is as faithful to his principles as he is to himself is the true partisan.

We shall not come again. We never shall come back again.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection.

The return makes one love the farewell.

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

Going away: I can generally bear the separation, but I don't like the leave-taking.

Now, we’ve made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

All the critics in the world may say it’s good but a man’s own mother will know.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols—all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child’s authentic self to a parent’s needs.

To make the child in your own image is a capital crime, for your image is not worth repeating. The child knows this and you know it. Consequently you hate each other.

Parents lend children their experience and a vicarious memory; children endow their parents with a vicarious immortality.

A father is very miserable who has no other hold on his children’s affection than the need they have of his assistance, if that can be called affection.

If you and your child were going to be lulled tomorrow/would you not give him to eat today?

There are some extraordinary fathers, who seenl, during the whole course of their lives, to be giving their children reasons for being consoled at their death.

I perceive affection makes a fool / Of any man too much the father.

The greatest reverence is due to a child! If you are contemplating a disgraceful act, despise not your child's tender years.

There is not so much comfort in the having of children as there is sorrow in parting with them.

The most ferocious animals are disarmed by caresses to their young.

Oh, what a power is motherhood, possessing / A potent spell. All women alike / Fight fiercely for a child.

The new-come stepmother hates the children born / to a first wife.

All men know their children / Mean more than life. If childless people sneer—/Well, they’ve less sorrow. But what lonesome luck!

Here all mankind is equal: / rich and poor alike, they love their children.

This is the reason why mothers are more devoted to their children than fathers: it is that they suffer more in giving them birth and are more certain that they are their own.

One of the most visible effects of a child’s presence in the household is to turn the worthy parents into complete idiots when, without him, they would perhaps have remained mere imbeciles.

We are the buffoons of our children.

The parasites live where the great have little secret sores.

Life is a paradox. Every truth has its counterpart which contradicts it; and every philosopher supplies the logic for his own undoing.

All the wise world is little else, in nature, / But parasites or subparasites.

He who confronts the paradoxical exposes himself to reality.

A little amateur painting in water-colour shows the innocent and quiet mind.

How vain painting is—we admire the realistic depiction of objects which in their original state we don’t admire at all.

One picture in ten thousand, perhaps, ought to live in the applause of mankind, from generation to generation until the colors fade and blacken out of sight or the canvas rot entirely away.

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure.

The picture waits for my verdict; it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claim to praise.

Rendering oneself unarmed when one had been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling—that is the means to real peace, which must always rest on a peace of mind.

One ought not to return injustice, nor do evil to anybody in the world, no matter what one may have suffered from them.

The distant Trojans never injured me.

Non-violence is not a garment to be put on and ofl at will. Its seat is in the heart, and it must be an inseparable part of our very being.

It is open to a war resister to judge between the combatants and wish success to the one who has justice on his side. By so judging he is more likely to bring peace between the two than by remaining a mere spectator.

Mental violence has no potency and injures only the person whose thoughts are violent. It is otherwise with mental nonviolence. It has potency which the world does not yet know.

The peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace, but a canting impotence.

If you have a nation of men who have risen to that height of moral cultivation that they will not declare war or carry arms, for they have not so much madness left in their brains, you have a nation of lovers, of benefactors, of true, great, and able men.