Quotes to inspire and reflect

There are some men who turn a deaf ear to reason and good advice, and wilfully go wrong for fear of being controlled.

Obstinacy and dogmatism are the surest signs of stupidity. Is there anything more confident, resolute, disdainful, grave and serious than an ass?

An obstinacy’s ne’er so stiff, / As when ’tis in a wrong belief.

Obstinacy / standing alone is the weakest of all things / in one whose mind is not possessed by wisdom.

[W]hat necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

Observation is an old man’s memory.

A stander-by may sometimes, peYhaps, see more of the game than he that plays it.

That which comes into the world to disturb nothing deserves neither respect nor patience.

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness Qn the desert air.

Sanity, soundness, and sincerity, of which gleams and strains can still be found in the human brain under powerful microscopes, flourish only in a culture of clarification, which is now becoming harder and harder to detect with the naked eye.

When the oak-tree is felled, the whole forest echoes with it; but a hundred acorns are planted silently by some unnoticed breeze.

Untruth being unacceptable to the mind of man, there is no other defence left for absurdity but obscurity.

A refined nature is vexed by knowing that some one owes it thanks, a coarse nature by knowing that it owes thanks to some one.

We cannot render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefits we receive must he rendered again line for line, deed for deed to somebody.

There are minds so impatient of inferiority that their gratitude is a species of revenge, and they return benefits, not because recompense is a pleasure, but because obligation is a pain.

All men feel an habitual gratitude, and something of an honourable bigotry, for the objects which have long continued to please them.

Things have their laws as well as men, and things refuse to be trifled with.

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

A fat man is never so happy as when he is describing himself as “robust."

The man who obeys is nearly always better than the man who commands.

The man who does something under orders is not unhappy; he is unhappy who does something against his will.

Oaths are but words, and words but wind, / Too feeble implements to bind.

It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed.

Man has wrested from nature the power to make the world a desert or to make the deserts bloom, there is no evil in the atom; only in men’s souls.

Man is the sole animal whose nudities offend his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.

We have genuflected before the god of science only to find that it has given us the atomic bomb, producing fears and anxieties that science can never mitigate.

We will not act prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of world-wide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth. But neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.

[T]each us all to do right, Lord, please, and to get along together with that atom bomb on this earth—

[T]he time is not far off when many nations in many parts of the world of many political shades and commitments will possess nuclear or even thermonuclear weapons.

The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.

No country without an atom bomb could properly consider itself independent.

It is always the latest song that an audience applauds the most.

As soon as we are shown the existence of something old in a new thing, we are pacified.

Only God and some few rare geniuses can keep forging ahead into novelty.

A brand new mediocrity is thought more of than accustomed excellence.

The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

Novelties 'please less than they impress.

For a long time he had wanted to express somehow that it was in his feet that he had the feeling of Russia, that he could touch and recognize all of her with his soles, as a blind man feels with his palms. And it was a pity when he reached the end of that stretch of rich brown earth and once again had to step along the resonant sidewalk.

Fler heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia.

I suddenly recall the arpeggios of laughter lilting across the tender, springtime grass—gay-welling, far- floating, fluent, spontaneous, a bell-like feminine fluting, then suppressed; as though snuffed swiftly and irrevocably beneath the quiet solemnity of the vespered air now vibrant with somber chapel bells.

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.

Be noble! and the nobleness that lies / In other men, sleeping, but never dead, / Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.

Let a man nobly live or nobly die.

The Stars are setting and the Caravan / Starts for the Dawn of Nothing—Oh, make haste!

The nobler a man, the harder it is for him to suspect inferiority in others.

Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. v

Night brings our troubles to the light, rather than banishes them.