Quotes to inspire and reflect

Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is one’s self.

Do not base your life on the judgments of others; first, because they are as likely to be mistaken as you are, and further, because you cannot know that they are telling you their true thoughts.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

We are never the same with others as when we are alone; we are different, even, when we are in the dark with them.

Most often it happens that one attributes to others only the feelings of which one is capable oneself.

Just as much as we see in others we have in ourselves.

None knows the weight of another’s burden.

We cannot forgive another for not being ourselves.

I often marvel how it is that though each man loves himself beyond all else, he should yet value his own opinion of himself less than that of others.

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.

We are better able to study our neighbors than ourselves, and their actions than our own.

Originality is the one thing which unoriginal minds cannot feel the use of.

He is great who is what he is from nature and who never reminds us of others.

All good things which exist are the fruits of originality.

Order always weighs on the individual. Disorder makes him wish for the police or for death. These are two extreme circumstances in which human nature is not at ease.

Peace is present when man can see the face that is composed of things that have meaning and are in their place. Peace is present when things form part of a whole greater than their sum, as the diverse minerals in the ground collect to become the tree.

The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but in walking orderly.

Symmetry is ennui, and ennui is the very essence of grief and melancholy. Despair yawns.

Watch out for the fellow who talks about putting things in order! Putting things in order always means getting other people under your control.

It is meritorious to insist on forms; religion and all else naturally clothes itself in forms. Everywhere the formed world is the only habitable one.

If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.

One day everything will be well, that is our hope: / Everything’s fine today, that is our illusion.

Optimism, n. The doctrine or belief that everything is beautiful, including what is ugly, everything good, especially the bad, and everything right that is wrong.

Now, as never before, hundreds of millions of men and women—who had formerly believed that stoic resignation in the face of hunger and disease and darkness was the best one could could do—have come alive with a new sense that the means are at hand with which to make for themselves a better life.

Optimism approves of everything, submits to everything, believes everything; it is the virtue above all of the taxpayer.

Men naturally despise those who court them, but respect those who do not give way to them.

Many a man’s strength is in opposition, and when that faileth, he groweth out of use.

Opposition, n. In politics the party that prevents the Government from running amuck by hamstringing it.

Remember that you ought to behave in life as you would at a banquet. As something is being passed around, it comes to you; stretch out your hand, take a portion of it politely. It passes on; do not detain it. Or it has not come to you yet; do not project your desire to meet it, but wait until it comes in front of you.

Look what can happen in this country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to college and wins a prize here and a prize there and ends up steering New York like her own private car.

Opinion is called the queen of the world; it is so, for when reason opposes it, it is condemned to death. It must rise twenty times from its ashes to gradually drive away the usurper.

Men seldom take the opinion of their equal, or of a man like themselves, upon trust.

If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last!

The sentiments of an adult are compounded of a kernal of instinct surrounded by a vast husk of education.

To observations which ourselves we make, / We grow more partial for th’ observer’s sake.

To reign by opinion, begin by trampling it under your feet.

One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.

Opinion is a powerful party, bold, and without measure.

In the human mind, one-sidedness has always been the rule, and many-sidedness the exception. Hence, even in revolutions of opinion, one part of the truth usually sets while another rises.

It is often easier as well as more advantageous to conform to other men’s opinions than to bring them over to ours.

An opinion, though it is original, does not necessarily differ from the accepted opinion; the important thing is that it does not try to conform to it.

If all men saw the fair and wise the same / men would not have debaters’ double strife.

We are of different opinions at different hours, but we always may be said to be at heart on the side of truth.

The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary is it that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally.

Some men are just as sure of the truth of their opinions as are others of what they know.

Men get opinions as boys learn to spell, / By reiteration chiefly.

The beautiful souls are they that are universal, open, and ready for all things.

An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.