Quotes to inspire and reflect

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.

[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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

[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 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.

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

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.

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.

The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

[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.

[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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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