Quotes to inspire and reflect

Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind.

Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals: so that, unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape—he is a shaper of the landscape.

Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.

Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, / And in that more lie all his hopes of good.

When malice has reason on its side it becomes proud, and parades reason in all its splendour.

One likes people much better when they're battered down by a prodigious siege of misfortunate than when they triumph.

Man loves malice, but not against one-eyed men nor the unfortunate, but against the fortunate and proud.

Malicious tongues spread their poison abroad and nothing here below is proof against them.

Malice often takes the garb of truth.

The malicious have a dark happiness.

Man’s life is a warfare against the malice of men.

I am convinced that we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.

What is madness? To have erroneous perceptions and to reason correctly from them.

A body seriously out of equilibrium, either with itself or with its environment, perishes outright. Not so a mind. Madness and suffering can set themselves no limit.

Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.

Here’s an object more of dread / Than aught the grave contains— / A human form with reason fled, / While wretched life remains.

Better mad with the rest of the world than wise alone.

There is less harm to be suffered in being mad among madmen than in being sane all by oneself.

Sanity is very rare: every man almost, and every woman, has a dash of madness.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

The wily lunatic is lost if through the narrowest crack he allows a sane eye to peer into his locked universe and thus profane it.

One man lies in his words, and gets a bad reputation; another in his manners, and enjoys a good one.

It is a general rule that when the grain of truth cannot be found, men will swallow great helpings of falsehood.

O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of existence.

I do myself a greater injury in lying than I do him of whom I tell a lie.

In plain truth, lying is an accursed vice. We are not men, nor have other tie upon one another, but by our word.

Life is a system of half-truths and lies, / Opportunistic, convenient evasion.

Lying is not only excusable; it is not only innocent, and instinctive; it is, above all, necessary and unavoidable. Without the ameliorations that it offers life would become a mere syllogism, and hence too metallic to be borne.

A single lie destroys a whole reputation for integrity.

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, hut is a stab at the health of human society.

He saw she was lying but it was a brave lie. They talked from their hearts—with the half truths and evasions peculiar to that organ, which has never been famed as an instrument of precision.

A falsehood is, in one sense, a dead thing; but too often it moves about, galvanized by self-will, and pushes the living out of their seats.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

And, after all, what is a lie? ’Tis but / The truth in masquerade; and I defy / Historians—heroes— lawyers—priests, to put / A fact without some leaven of a lie.

A lie faces God and shrinks from man.

Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance.

What nature requires is obtainable, and within easy reach. It’s for the superfluous we sweat.

Luxury either comes of riches or makes them necessary; it corrupts at once rich and poor, the rich by possession and the poor by covetousness.

They must know but little of mankind who can imagine that, after they have been once seduced by luxury, they can ever renounce it.

Our expense is almost all for conformity. It is for cake that we all run in debt.

The lust for comfort, that stealthy thing that enters the house a guest, and then becomes a host, and then a master.

Like any lover, he desired to please; suffered agonies at the thought of failure, and brightened his dress with smart ties and handkerchiefs and other youthful touches.

Of all affliction taught a lover yet, / ’Tis sure the hardest science to forget.

A lover without indiscretion is no lover at all.

All lovers unconsciously establish their own rules of the game, which from the outset admit of no transgression.