Quotes to inspire and reflect

All of one’s contemporaries and aging friends are living in a delicate balance, and one feels that one’s own consciousness is no longer as brightly lit as it once was. But then, twilight with its more subdued colors has its charms as well.

I never saw a man who looked

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?

Why don’t you come up sometime, and see me?

Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?

Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.

For there is no friend like a sister

There could I marvel

And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

The true paradises are the paradises that we have lost.

It was the winter wild,

Time is our tedious song should here have ending.

The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet.

O, father forsaken, Forgive your son!

It is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Never literary attempt was more unfortunate than my Treatise of Human Nature. It fell dead-born from the press.

Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

Money … is none of the wheels of trade: it is the oil which renders the motion of the wheels more smooth and easy.

Beauty is no quality in things themselves. It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them.

Custom, then, is the great guide of human life.

If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning, concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.

It is better to be seventy years young than forty years old!

O imitatores, servum pecus.

Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image.

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what

An attachment à la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not too French French bean!

A cold coming we had of it,

The times they are a-changin’.

In every parting there is an image of death.

I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.

‘God bless us every one!’ said Tiny Tim.

Il maestro di color che sanno.

‘Bah,’ said Scrooge. ‘Humbug!’

He holds him with his glittering eye—

They gave it me,—for an un-birthday present.

Gin a body meet a body

When we two parted

Never the time and the place

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;

I have often thought, says Sir Roger, it happens very well that Christmas should fall out in the Middle of Winter.

I saw three ships come sailing by, Come sailing by, come sailing by, I saw three ships come sailing by, On New Year’s Day in the morning.

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner, Eating a Christmas pie. He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, And said, “What a good boy am I!”

When she introduces me to her parents back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie, should I sit knees together on their 3rd degree sofa and not ask Where’s the bathroom?

Fear was my father, Father Fear. His look drained the stones.

Leaving the page of the book carelessly open, something unsaid, the phone off the hook and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy.

and nothing quite so least as truth —i say though hate were why men breathe— because my father lived his soul love is the whole and more than all