Quotes to inspire and reflect

“Clutch your chest. Fall off that horse,” they directed. That was it. Death was the extent of Indian acting in the movie theater.

Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.

Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast, / When husbands, or when lapdogs breathe their last.

Now let the weeping cease; / Let no one mourn again. / These things are in the hands of God.

To weep excessively for the dead is to affront the living.

What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

The vastest earthly Day / Is shrunken small / By one Defaulting Face / Behind a Pall.

The dead sleep in their moonless night; my business is with the living.

Ah! surely Nothing dies but Something mourns!

Let mourning stop when one’s grief is fully expressed.

The Light of Lights / Looks always on the motive, not the deed, / The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.

The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains, appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships.

Men can be stimulated by hope or driven by fear, but the hope and the fear must be vivid and immedi-

A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.

I’ve made a long voyage and been to a strange country, and I’ve seen the dark man very close; and I don’t think I was too much afraid of him, but so much of mortality still clings to me—I wanted most desperately to live and still do.

He advised people to have intellect, and to look beneath what he called “the epithelium of things,” though he did discourage scrutiny of his own motives.

For all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Our life’s a moment and less than a moment, but even this mite nature has mockingly humored with some appearance of a longer span.

Mortality has its compensations: one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come. 1

One thing is certain and the rest is Lies; /The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

To venerate the simple days / Which lead the seasons by, / Needs but to remember / That from you or

Most men eddy about / Here and there—eat and drink, / Chatter and love and hate, / Gather and squander, are raised / Aloft, are hurled in the dust, / Striving blindly, achieving / Nothing; and then they die— / Perish;—and no one asks / Who or what they have been.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

For what human ill does not dawn seem to be an alleviation?

A man who moralizes is usually a hypocrite, and a woman who moralizes is invariably plain.

It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising,’ but doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.

The moral sense enables one to perceive morality—and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.

As society is now constituted, a literal adherence to the moral precepts scattered throughout the Gospels would mean sudden death.

It is not best that we use our morals week days; it gets them out of repair for Sundays.

Morals are an acquirement—like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis—no man is born with them.

To make our morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a secret element of gusto.

We must never delude ourselves into thinking that physical power is a substitute for moral power, which is the true sign of national greatness.

The great secret of morals is love.

“It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself.”

Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value.

Our virtues / Lie in th’ interpretation of the time.

Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for co-operation with oneself.

There cannot any one moral rule be proposed whereof a man may not justly demand a reason.

The difference between a moral man and a man of honor is that the latter regrets a discreditable act, even when it has worked and he has not been caught.

Abstractions about right and wrong, whether they are as old as Thou Shalt Not Kill or as modern as Do Your Own Thing, often serve only to confuse and weaken genuine moral decision.

Every man has his moral backside too, which he doesn’t expose unnecessarily but keeps covered as long as possible by the trousers of decorum.

There can be no final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has had his experience and said his say.

Morality is largely a matter of geography.

He who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.

The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers.

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals it is the modern strengthening of minor morals.

A man may not transgress the bounds of major morals, but may make errors in minor morals.