Quotes to inspire and reflect

World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor—it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

Countries do not assume burdens because it is fair, only because it is necessary.

An ally need not own the land he helps.

We shall be judged more by what we do at home than what we preach abroad.

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

If men would avoid that general language and general manner in which they strive to hide all that is peculiar, and would say only what was uppermost in their own minds, after their own individual manner, every man would be interesting.

The truth is that no horizon is especially interesting by itself, by virtue of its peculiar content, and that any horizon, wide or narrow, brilliant or dull, varied or monotonous, may possess an interest of its own which merely requires a vital adjustment to be discovered.

Every man’s affairs, however little, are important to himself.

Since the creation of the world there has been no tyrant like Intemperance, and no slaves so cruelly treated as his.

Intemperance is the plague of sensuality, and temperance is not its bane but its seasoning.

With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference between the half and the whole.

The impulses of an incontinent man carry him in the opposite direction from that towards which he was aiming.

A good mind possesses a kingdom.

It’s not a man’s great frame / Or breadth of shoulders makes his manhood count: / A man 01 sense has always the advantage.

The greater intellect one has, the more originality one finds in men. Ordinary persons find no difference between men.

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

Tis the sharpness of our mind that gives the edge to our pains and pleasures.

If the human intellect functions, it is actually in order to solve the problems which the man’s inner destiny sets it.

The greatest intelligence is precisely the one that suffers most from its own limitations.

What men, in their egotism, constantly mistake for a deficiency of intelligence in women is merely an incapacity for mastering that mass of small intellectual tricks, that complex of petty knowledges, that collection of cerebral rubberstamps, which constitute the chief mental equipment of the average male.

Generally among intelligent people are found nothing but paralytics and among men of action nothing but fools.

One good head is better than a hundred strong hands.

The French equate intelligence with rational discourse, the Russians with intense soul-searching. For the Mexican, intelligence is inseparable from maliciousness.

We pay / a high price for being intelligent. Wisdom hurts.

A superior man may be made to go to the well, but he cannot be made to go down into it. He may be imposed upon, but he cannot be fooled.

To the dull mind all nature is leaden. To the illumined mind the whole world burns and sparkles with light.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B.F. Skinner.

Intellectuals, generally, no longer take jazz seriously.

Ironically, rock and roll, or whatever you want to call what the hysterical disc jockeys play, is very much in vogue now among intellectuals in New York and Paris and London.

On the heights it is warmer than people in the valley suppose, especially in winter. The thinker recognizes the full import of this simile.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

A man known to us only as a celebrity in politics or in trade, gains largely in our esteem if we discover that he has some intellectual taste or skill.

When faith is lost, when honor dies, / The man is dead.

The truth is, hardly any of us have ethical energy enough for more than one really inflexible point of honor.

Honor is like a steep island without a shore: one cannot return once one is outside.

A man who permits his honor to be taken, permits his life to be taken.

’Tis said that persons living on annuities /Are longer lived than others.

Buy an annuity cheap, and make your life interesting to yourself and everybody else that watches the speculation.

A wise man is superior to any insults which can be put upon him, and the best reply to unseemly behavior is patience and moderation.

When the praying does no good, insurance does help.

The more rational an institution is the less it suffers by making concessions to others.

Catastrophes come when some dominant institution, swollen like a soap-bubble and still standing without foundations, suddenly crumbles at the touch of what may seem a word or an idea, but is really some stronger material force.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall iiito institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

Wise and prudent men—intelligent conservatives—have long known that in a changing world wor

An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

The test of political institutions is the condition of the country whose future they regulate.