Quotes to inspire and reflect

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don’t have it.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.

Ready money is Aladdin’s lamp.

Money has a power above / The stars and fate, to manage love: / Whose arrows, learned poets hold, / That never miss, are tipped with gold.

People who can least afford to pay rent, pay rent. People who can most afford to pay rent, build up equity.

Life is short and so is money.

Money, n. A blessing that is of no advantage to us excepting when we part with it.

The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

Monastic incarceration is castration.

Modesty—is a quality in a lover more praised by women than liked.

With people of only moderate ability modesty is a mere honesty; but with those who possess great talent it is hypocrisy.

The sage never seems to know his own merits, for only by not noticing them can you call others’ attention to them.

Loquacity storms the ear, but modesty takes the heart.

Nothing is more amiable than true modesty, and nothing more contemptible than the false. The one guards virtue, the other betrays it.

A just and reasonable modesty does not only recommend eloquence, but sets off every great talent which a man can be possessed of.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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