Quotes to inspire and reflect

To wish the greatness of our own country is often to wish evil to our neighbors. He who could bring himself to wish that his country should always remain as it is, would be a citizen of the universe.

All nations have present, or past, or future reasons for thinking themselves incomparable.

Growing nations should remember that, in nature, no tree, though placed in the best conditions of light, soil, and plot, can continue to grow and spread indefinitely.

For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.

Every nation thinks its own madness normal and requisite; more passion and more fancy it calls folly, less it calls imbecility.

The driving force of a nation lies in its spiritual purpose, made effective by free, tolerant but unremitting national will.

A nation may be said to consist of its territory, its people, and its laws. The territory is the only part which is of certain durability.

A nation usually renews its youth on a political sick-bed, and there finds again the spirit which it had gradually lost in seeking and maintaining power.

We must recognize that every nation determines its policies in terms of its own interests.

A nation can be no stronger abroad than she is at home. Only an America which practices what it preaches about equal rights and social justice will be respected by those whose choice affects our future.

A nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honors, the men it remembers.

Every country should realize that its turn at world domination, domination because its rights coincided more or less with the character or progress of the epoch, must terminate with the change brought about by this progress.

Size is not grandeur, and territory does not make a nation.

There is a genius of a nation, which is not to be found in the numerical citizens, but which characterizes the society.

The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.

A nation will not count the sacrifice it makes, if it supposes it is engaged in a struggle for its fame, its influence and its existence.

Narrow / The heart that loves, the brain that contemplates, /The life that wears, the spirit that creates / One object, and one form, and builds thereby / A sepulchre for its eternity.

Minds that have nothing to confer / Find little to perceive.

Blessed is the satirist; and blessed the ironist; blessed the witty scoffer, and blessed the sentimentalist; for each, having seen one spoke of the wheel, thinks to have seen all, and is content.

It is with narrow-souled people as with narrownecked bottles: the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standard that implies).

For every man there is something in the vocabulary that would stick to him like a second skin. His enemies have only to find it.

Of all eloquence a nickname is the most concise; of all arguments the most unanswerable.

I like peasants—they are not sophisticated enough to reason speciously.

They fall for the latest isms gullibly as pups for rubber bones.

The ignorance of the world leaves one at the mercy, of its malice.

The greenhorn is the ultimate victor in everything; it is he that gets the most out of life.

When myth meets myth, the collision is very real.

The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.

Mysticism is, in essence, little more than a certain intensity and depth of feeling in regard to what is believed about the universe.

Without mysticism man can achieve nothing great.

Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.

I mean jazz. 1 don't mean rock and roll. I mean the never-the-same-way-twice music the American black people gave the world.

Muzak pervades Las Vegas from the time you walk into the airport upon landing to the last time you leave the casinos.

The harmony of a concert, to which you listen with delight, must have on certain classes of minute animals the effect of terrible thunder; perhaps it kills them.

Men profess to be lovers of music, but for the most part they give no evidence in their opinions and lives that they have heard it. It would not leave them narrow-minded and bigoted.

[Of music]. Thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found and shall not find.

Music is a means of giving form to our inner feelings without attaching them to events or objects in the world.

When I am not too sad to listen, music is my consolation.

Without music, life would be an error. The German imagines even God singing songs.

Music quickens time, she quickens us to the finest enjoyment of time.

To produce music is also in a sense to produce children.

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilized into time and tune.

No one can get really drunk on a novel or a painting, but who can help getting drunk on Beethoven’s Ninth, Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, or the Beatles’White Album?

[Music] takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.

Music was invented to.confirm human loneliness.