Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Let a man nobly live or nobly die.

Noise has one advantage. It drowns out words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

“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.

[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.

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] 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

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

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.

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.

[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.

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

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.

[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 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.

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

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?

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

Nowadays truth is the greatest news.

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.

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 “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.