Quotes to inspire and reflect

Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, / That he goes the farthest who goes far enough.

It is circumstance and proper measure that give an action its character, and make it either good or bad.

It is only through restraint that man can manage not to suppress himself.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negroes’ great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ “Councilor” or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to “order” than to justice.

The nose of a mob is its imagination. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.

Ask the gods nothing excessive.

The mob gets out of hand, runs wild, worse / than raging fire, while the man who stands apart / is called a coward.

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.

In the hands of vicious men, / a mob will do anything. But under good leaders / it’s quite a different story.

Mobs in their emotions are much like children, / subject to the same tantrums and fits of fury.

The miser is the man who starves himself, and everybody else, in order to worship wealth in its dead form, as distinct from its living form.

The miser puts his gold pieces into a coffer; but as soon as the coffer is closed, it is as if it were empty.

True misanthropes are nof found in solitude, but in the world: because it is practical experience of the world and not philosophy that makes men hate.

There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.

The image in the mirror was instantaneously transformed: suddenly it was a woman in her undergarments, a beautiful, distant, indifferent woman with a terribly out-of-place bowler hat on her head, holding the hand of a man in a gray suit and tie.

Every man carries with him through life a mirror, as unique and impossible to get rid of as his shadow.

I have come to know that the miracle rarely happens in human affairs; Lazarus is uncured and bleeds from his sores.

Men talk about Bible miracles because there is no miracle in their lives. Cease to gnaw that crust. There is ripe fruit over your head.

Religion seems to have grown an infant with age, and requires miracles to nurse it, as it had in its infancy.

There is in every miracle a silent chiding of the world, and a tacit reprehension of them who require, or who need miracles.

Minds differ still more than faces.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.

Mind has transformed the world, and the world is repaying it with interest. It has led man where he had no idea how to go.

How few things can a man measure with the tape of his understanding! How many greater things might he be seeing in the meanwhile.

The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written; it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.

The mind is the expression of the soul, which belongs to God and must be let alone by government.

The mind is a dangerous weapon, even to the possessor, if he knows not discreetly how to use it.

We are less justified in saying that the thinking life of humanity is a miraculous perfectioning of animal and physical life than that it is an imperfection in the organization of spiritual life as rudimentary as the communal existence of protozoa in colonies.

Outside, among your fellows, among strangers, you must preserve appearances, a hundred things you cannot do; but inside, the terrible freedom!

The mind wants the world to return its love, or its awareness; the mind wants to know all the world, and all eternity, and God.

There are some things the arrogant mind does not see; it is blinded by its vision of what it desires.

Mind is a light which the Gods mock us with, / To lead those false who trust it.

If the mind, which rules the body, ever forgets itself so far as to trample upon its slave, the slave is never generous enough to forgive the injury; but will rise and smite its oppressor.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

What we think and feel and are is to a great extent determined by the state of our ductless glands and our viscera.

[J]ust make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly falls away.

We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and lulls, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way to achievement.

[A]t three o’clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn’t work—and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.

The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

The army is a nation within the nation; it is a vice of our time.

The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.

You cannot organize civilization around the core of militarism and at the same time expect reason to control human destinies.

It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing other good, decent fellows like himself, his gun would fall from his hands.

He who loves the bristle of bayonets, only sees in their glitter what beforehand he feels in his heart.

Raw in the fields the rude militia swarms, / Mouth without hands; maintained at vast expense, / In peace a charge, in war a weak defence.

The provincial, the middle-class, the bourgeois, are to be found everywhere; they are necessary, I suppose—only, when you differ from their own narrow molds, they may try to crucify you.

I call bourgeois anyone who says no to himself, who gives up struggle and renounces love in favor of his security. I call bourgeois anyone who places anything above feeling.

[The bourgeois] prefers comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to that deathly inner consuming fire.