Quotes to inspire and reflect

Then fly betimes, for only they / Conquer Love that run away.

’Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark / Our coming, and look brighter when we come.

You say that love is nonsense.... I tell you it is no such thing. For weeks and months it is a steady physical pain, an ache about the heart, never leaving one, by night or by day; a long strain on one’s nerves like toothache or rheumatism, not intolerable at any one instant, but exhausting by its steady drain on the strength.

It [love] is a disease to be born with patience, like any nervous complaint, and to be treated with counter-irritants.

A good man should and must / Sit rather down with loss than rise unjust.

It is the image in the mind that binds us to our lost treasures, but it is the loss that shapes the image.

When the world has once begun to use us ill, it afterwards continues the same treatment with less scruple or ceremony, as men do to a whore.

Nobody ever chooses the already unfortunate as objects of his loyal friendship.

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

If a man once fall, all will tread upon him.

Not a soul takes thought how well he may live— only how long: yet a good life might be everybody’s, a long one can be nobody’s.

In a game, just losing is almost as satisfying as just winning.... In life the loser’s score is always zero.

The man who has lived the longest is not he who has spent the greatest number of years, but he who has had the greatest sensibility of life.

Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on anyhow and in any shape.

Life protracted is protracted woe.

Measurement of life should be proportioned rather to the intensity of the experience than to its actual length.

The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing.

’Tis very certain the desire of life / Prolongs it.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

She had figured out that the most pervasive American disease was loneliness, and that even people at the top often suffered from it, and that they could be surprisingly responsive to attractive strangers who were friendly.

Loneliness is bred of a mind that has grown earth- bound.

The body is a house of many windows: there we all sit, showing ourselves and crying on the passers-by to come and love us.

In solitude the lonely man is eaten up by himself, among crowds by the many.

The most I ever did for you was to outlive you. / But that is much.

Who knows what true loneliness is—not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.

Whom the heart of man shuts out, / Sometimes the heart of God takes in, / And fences them all round about / With silence mid the world’s loud din.

It is reasonable to assume that, by and large, what is not read now will not be read, ever. It is also reasonable to assume that practically nothing that is read now will be read later.

We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything; otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty.

The story [Henny-Penny] has the best opening in all literature—“The sky is falling,” cried Henny- Penny, “and a piece of it fell on my tail.”

The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously-—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

The attempt to devote oneself to literature alone is a most deceptive thing, and that often, paradoxically, is literature that suffers for it.

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

Like every other form of art, literature is no more and nothing less than a matter of life and death. The only question worth asking about a story—or a poem, or a piece of sculpture, or a new concert hall—is, “Is it dead or alive?”

The two basic stories of all times are Cinderella and Jack the Giant Killer—the charm of women and the courage of men.

A person who knows nothing about literature may be an ignoramus, but many people don t mind being that.

The unusual is only found in a very small percentage, except in literary creations, and that is exactly what makes literature.

The “greatness” of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.

With both agents and publishers hungry for bestsellers, literature will have to end up as a cottage industry.

It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean.

O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life, but exhaust the limits of the possible.

The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for 1 never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward- the bars.

We cannot all hope tocombine the pleasing qualities of good looks, brains, and eloquence.

A good marksman may miss.

I am not eternity, but a man; a part of the whole, as an hour is of the day.

Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations.

Science says: “We must live,” and seeks the means of prolonging, increasing, facilitating and amplifying life, of making it tolerable and acceptable; wisdom says: “We must die," and seeks how to make us die well.