Quotes to inspire and reflect

Heaven be thanked, we live in such an age, / When no man dies for love, but on the stage.

Love joins and then divides. How else would we be growing?

Love is a growing, or full constant light; / And his first minute, after noon, is night.

Without outward declarations, who can conclude an inward love?

Being got it [love] is a treasure sweet, / Which to defend, is harder than to get: / And ought not be profaned on either part, / For though 'tis got by chance, tis kept by art.

Love is done when Love’s begun, / Sages say, / But have Sages known?

No man may be so cursed by priest or pope / but what the Eternal Love may still return / while any thread of green lives on in hope.

Behold this little Bane—/The Boon of all alive— / As common as it is unknown / The name of it is Love.

Love alone / is the true seed of every merit in you, / and of all acts for which you must atone.

Words are the weak support of cold indifference; love has no language to be heard.

If there’s delight in love, 'tis when I see / That heart which others bleed for, bleed for me.

To love a thing means wanting it to live.

Love is the admiration and cherishing of the amiable qualities of the beloved person, upon the condition of yourself being the object of their action.

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

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.

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

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.

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

It takes a genius to whine appealingly.

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

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.

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

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.

Life protracted is protracted woe.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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

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?”

It is with noble sentiments that bad literature gets written.

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

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