Quotes to inspire and reflect

Show me one couple unhappy merely on account of their limited circumstances, and I will show you ten who are wretched from other causes.

When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.

But I had not quite fixed whether to make him [Don Juan] end in Hell—or in an unhappy marriage,—not knowing which would be the severest.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

[I]t had been from the first her great mistake—to meet him, to marry him, to love him as she so bitterly had. Looking at his face, it sometimes came to her that all women had been cursed from the cradle; all, in one fashion or another, being given the same cruel destiny, born to suffer the weight of men.

One was never married, and that’s his hell; another is, and that’s his plague.

The capacity of women to make unsuitable marriages must be considered as the cornerstone of society.

When a match has equal partners / then I fear not.

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

I’d discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it improperly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up.

A bad manner spoils everything, even reason and justice; a good one supplies everything, gilds a No, sweetens truth, and adds a touch of beauty to old age itself.

A man without ceremony had need of great merit in its place.

There is nothing settled in manners, but the laws of behavior yield to the energy of the individual.

Manners require time, as nothing is more vulgar than haste.

Manners make the fortune of the ambitious youth.

Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each once a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage.

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.

Fine manners need the support of fine manners in others.

We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners.

Society is smoothed to that excess, / That manners hardly differ more than dress.

The noblest work of God? Man. Who found it out? Man.

Manners maketh man. Yes, but they make woman still more.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is Man.

I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.

The fish in the water is silent, the animal on the earth is noisy, the bird in the air is singing. / But Man has in him the silence of the sea, the noise of the earth and the music of the air.

What a piece of work is man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving

The mass of mankind is divided into two classes, the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad.

A man has many parts, he is virtually everything, and you are free to select in him that part which pleases you.

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depository of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!

For in fact what is man in nature? A Nothing in comparison with the Infinite, an All in comparison with Nothing, a mean between nothing and everything.

Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveler’s helmet. Stay inside or you perish.

Alas for this mad melancholy beast man! What phantasies invade it, what paroxysms of perversity, hysterical senselessness, and mental bestiality break out immediately, at the very slightest check on its being the beast of action.

Man, in good earnest, is a marvelous vain, fickle, and unstable subject, and on whom it is very hard to form any certain and uniform judgment.

I have never seen greater monster or miracle in the world than myself.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly. He is like a watch of which the most that can be said is that its cosmetic effect is good.

Every man carries the entire form of human condition.

Man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes.

i suppose the human race / is doing the best it can / but hells bells thats / only an explanation / its not an excuse.

The Family of Man is more than three billion strong. It lives in more than one hundred nations. Most of its members are not white. Most of them are not Christians. Most of them know nothing about free enterprise, or due process of law or the Australian ballot.

Whatever profits man, that is the truth. In him all nature is comprehended, in all nature only he is created, and all nature only for him. He is the measure of all things, and his welfare is the sole and single criterion of truth.

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.

Among all creatures that breathe on earth and crawl on it / there is not anywhere a thing more dismal than man is.

The majority of mankind is lazyminded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith.

It were no slight attainment could we merely fulfil what the nature of man implies.

Man is not only a contributary creature, but a total creature; he does not only make one, but he is all; he is not a piece of the world, but the world itself; and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust.