Quotes to inspire and reflect

You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day.

It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing.

The night / Shows stars and women in a better light.

“Anyway, I don’t want to live in New York. I want some place more like where we used to live in New Jersey. I don’t like living here. There aren’t any trees.”

New York is of course many cities, and an exile does not return to the one he left.

This great city has fed my imagination—it has allowed me to dream.

The utter insanity of living in a place like this doesn’t occur to the 9,000,000 people who inhabit New York. Except for visits I think I shall not be here any more as a resident.

[New York] isn’t like the rest of the country—it’s like a nation itself-—more tolerant than the rest in a curious way. Littleness gets swallowed up here. All the viciousness that makes other cities vicious is sucked up and absorbed in New York.

New York is a wonderful city.... It is going to be the capital of the world.

Almost all the people I met in New York were trying to reduce.

[New York] is the place where all the aspirations of the Western World meet to form one vast master aspiration, as powerful as the suction of a steam

The beauty of New York is unintentional; it arose independent of human design, like a stalagmite cavern.

Melting pot Harlem—Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall. Dusky dream Harlem rumbling into a nightmare tunnel where the subway from the Bronx keeps right on downtown.

[A]s long as what is is—and Georgia is Georgia—I will take Harlem for mine. At least, if trouble comes, I will have my own window to shoot from.

I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love" in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and never love anyone quite that way again.

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

You can never get all the facts from just one newspaper, and unless you have the facts, you cannot make proper judgments about what is going on.

You should never form judgments from front page headlines. As with a contract, the fine print on the inside pages should be carefully studied.

[I]f you work in either journalism or politics...you will be flogged for being right and flogged for being wrong, and it hurts both ways—but it doesn’t hurt as much when you’re right.

A newspaper, not having to act on its descriptions and reports, but only to sell them to idly curious people, has nothing but honor to lose by inaccuracy and unveracity.

One of the most valuable philosophical features of journalism is that it realizes that truth is not a solid but a fluid.

One reads the papers as one wants to with a bandage over one’s eyes without trying to understand the facts, listening to the soothing words of the editor as to the words of one’s mistress.

The window to the world can be covered by a newspaper.

Newspapers always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment.

Newspapers are horror happening to other people.

Do not, oh do not indulge such a wild idea that a newspaper might err! If so what have we to trust in this age of sham?

Nowadays truth is the greatest news.

Give to a gracious message / An host of tongues, but let ill tidings tell / Themselves when they be felt.

We are all prone to the malady of the introvert, who, with the manifold spectacle of the world spread out before him, turns away and gazes only upon the emptiness within. But let us not imagine that there is anything grand about the introvert’s unhappiness.

The New England spirit does not seek solutions in a crowd; raw light and solitariness are less dreaded than welcomed as enhancers of our essential selves.

If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick.

The “sensibility” claimed by neurotics is matched by their egotism; they cannot abide the flaunting by others of the sufferings to which they pay an ever increasing attention in themselves.

The multitude of the sick shall not make us deny the existence of health.

We may say that hysteria is a caricature of an artistic creation, a compulsion neurosis a caricature of a religion, and a paranoiac delusion a caricature of a philosophic system.

There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.

Oh the nerves, the nerves; the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it: poor creatures that we are!

Each man is afraid of his neighbor’s disapproval—a thing which, to the general run of the race, is more dreaded than wounds and death.

Your next-door neighbour ... is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours.

The constant demands of the heart and the belly can allow man only an incidental indulgence in the pleasures of the eye and the understanding.

Understanding human needs is half the job of meeting them.

No living being is held by anything so strongly as by its own needs. Whatever therefore appears a hindrance to these, be it brother, or father, or child, or mistress, or friend, is hated, abhorred, execrated.

Want gave tongue, and, at her howl, / Sin awakened with a growl.

The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.

The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of our invention.

Necessity is the theme and the inventress, the eternal curb and law of nature.

How base a thing it is / when a man will struggle with necessity! / We have to die.

Against necessity, / against its strength, no one can fight and win.

I have learned / To look on nature, not as in the hour / Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes / The still, sad music of humanity.