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

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

Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to 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.

O, father forsaken, Forgive your son!

The star-led wizards haste with odours sweet.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

A cold coming we had of it,

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

In every parting there is an image of death.

The times they are a-changin’.

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

I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.

Il maestro di color che sanno.

‘Bah,’ said Scrooge. ‘Humbug!’

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

He holds him with his glittering eye—

Gin a body meet a body

When we two parted

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;

Never the time and the place

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.

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

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?

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

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

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

A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of the year.

my father moved through dooms of love through sames of am through haves of give, singing each morning out of each night my father moved through depths of height