Quotes to inspire and reflect

As you got older, and felt yourself to be at the centre of your time, and not at a point in its circumference, as you felt when you were little, you were seized with a sort of shuddering.

The blush that flies at seventeen / Is fixed at forty-nine.

After thirty, a man wakes up sad every morning, excepting perhaps five or six, until the day of his death.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

[TJhough we are perpetually bragging of it [the middle class] as our safety, it is nothing but a poor fringe on the mantle of the upper class.

Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success.

There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg.

The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone—but never hustled.

The assumption of merit is easier, less embarrassing, and more effectual than the actual attainment of it.

The quality of mercy is not strained; / It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven / Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed—/ It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes.

A man who has no office to go to—I don’t care who he is—is a trial of which you can have no conception.

A man is like a phonograph with half-a-dozen records. You soon get tired of them all; and yet you have to sit at table whilst he reels them off to every new visitor.

There was, I think, never any reason to believe in any innate superiority of the male, except his superior muscle.

The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.

There’s nothing like mixing with woman to bring out all the foolishness in a man of sense.

Male, n. A member of the unconsidered, or negligible sex. The male of the human race is commonly known (to the female) as Mere Man. The genus has two varieties: good providers and bad providers.

If a woman wants to hold a man, she has merely to appeal to what is worst in him. We make gods of men, and they leave us. Others make brutes of them and they fawn and are faithful.

Men always want to be a woman's first love. That is their clumsy vanity. We women have a more subtle instinct about things. What we like is to be a man’s last romance.

[Mjen were valued by what they did, women by how they looked and then by what their husbands did, and all of life was arranged (or so we thought)' from the outside in.

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

[T]he warfare between the unaroused male and female is constant and ferocious. Each blames the other for his loss of soul.

I have thought that men and women should never come together except in bed. There is the only place where their natural hatred of each other is not so apparent.

In their hearts women think that it is men’s business to earn money and theirs to spend it.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you’re driving at another.

No woman ever hates a man for being in love with her, but many a woman hates a man for being a friend to her.

There’s something even/ woman wants, and that’s a man to blame.

Woman’s life must be wrapped up in a man, and the cleverest woman on earth is the biggest fool with a man.

Woman understands children better than man does, but man is more childlike than woman.

When a man’s in love, he at once makes a pedestal-of the Ten Commandments and stands on the top of them with his arms akimbo. When a womans in love she doesnt care two straws for Thou Shalt and Thou Shalt Not.

Only he who is man enough will release the woman in woman.

Women become attached to men by the favors they grant them; men are cured by these same favors.

Nowadays beautiful women are counted among the talents of their husbands.

The consequence of a very free commerce between the sexes, and of their living much together, will often terminate in intrigues and gallantry.

Men are the reason that women do not love one another.

You don’t work no harder than me and yet you expects me to do the shopping, cooking, cleaning, and wash your filthy clothes, too, when I come home.

The average woman sees only the weak points in a strong man, and the good points in a weak one.

Strange difference of sex, that time and circumstance, which enlarge the views of most men, narrow the views of women almost invariably.

Man is a wretch without woman; but woman is a monster—and thank Heaven, an almost impossible and hitherto imaginary monster—without man, as her acknowledged principal!

The women I have loved I have desired for themselves, but also because I feared myself.

If the heart of a man is depressed with cares, / The mist is dispelled when a woman appears.

When man and woman die, as poets sung, / His heart’s the last part moves, her last, the tongue.

Men live by forgetting—women live on memories.

The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.

The innumerable conflicts that set fnen and women against one another come from the fact that neither is prepared to assume all the consequences of this situation which the one has offered and the other accepted.

What’s memory' but the ash / That chokes our fires that have begun to sink?

In memory’s telephoto lens, far objects are magnified.