Quotes to inspire and reflect

Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.

Well-bred instinct meets reason halfway.

I do not remember—that is the point—the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.

Commonsense is the wick of the candle.

O, what men dare do! what men may do! what men daily do, not knowing what they do!

My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and absolute freedom—freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves.

We are reassured almost as foolishly as we are alarmed; human nature is so constituted.

But we, we have no sense of direction; impetus / Is all we have; we do not proceed, we only / Roll down the mountain, / Like disbalanced boulders, crushing before us many / Delicate springing things, whose plan it was to grow.

What can we take on trust / in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness, / pride—nothing is secure, nothing keeps.

Suspense—is Hostiler than Death— / Death— tho’soever Broad, / Is just Death, and cannot increase— / Suspense—does not conclude—.

The fly ought to be used as the symbol of impertinence and audacity; for whilst all other animals shun man more than anything else, and run away even before he comes near them, the fly lights upon his very nose.

God in His wisdom made the fly / And then forgot to tell us why.

insects have / their own point / of view about / civilization / a man / thinks he amounts / to a great deal / but to a / flea or a / mosquito a / human being is / merely something / good to eat.

Is there a polity better ordered, the offices better distributed, and more inviolably observed and maintained, than that of bees?

The Spider as an Artist / Has never been employed— / Though his surpassing Merit / Is freely certified.

There is frequently more to be learned from the unexpected questions of a child than the discourses of men, who talk in a road, according to the notions they have borrowed and the prejudices of their education.

The questions that are beyond the reach of economics—the beauty, dignity, pleasure and durability of life—may be inconvenient but they are important.

The sun shines and warms and lights us and we have no curiosity to know why this is so; but we ask the reason of all evil, of pain, and hunger, and mosquitoes and- silly people.

The rude beginnings of every art acquire a greater celebrity!than the art in perfection; he who first played the fiddle was looked upon as a demigod.

Many a profound genius, I suppose, who fills the world with fame of,his exploding renowned errors, is yet every day posed [baffled] by trivial questions at his own supper-table.

We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.

Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the subject is new.

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

Great scientific discoveries have been made by men seeking to verify quite erroneous theories about the nature of things.

Time is the greatest innovator.

Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors.

Whoever blushes is already guilty; true innocence is ashamed of nothing.

He’s armed without that’s innocent within.

The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence.

Injustice in this world is not something comparative; the wrong is deep, clear, and absolute in each private fate.

Injustice, swift, erect, and unconfined, / Sweeps the wide earth, and tramples o’er mankind.

We must believe in the gods no longer if injustice is to prevail over justice.

It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men.

No man at bottom means injustice; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfulest way, by natural dimness and selfishness; getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest, till at length it become all but irrecognis- able.

Those whom men have injured they despise.

A brave man thinks no one his superior who does him an injury; for he has it then in his power to make himself superior to the other by forgiving it.

It is far pleasanter to injure and afterwards beg forgiveness than to be injured and grant forgiveness. He who does the former gives evidence of power and afterwards of kindness of character.

Nothing may help or heal / While Amor incensed remembers wrong.

He threatens many that hath injured one.

Wounds heal and become scars. But scars grow with us.

’Tis better to suffer wrong than do it.

Forgetting of a wrong is a mild revenge.

Wounds cannot be cured without searching.

Eaten bread is forgotten.

A wretched child / Is he who does not return his parents' care.

Take here the grand secret—if not of pleasing all, yet of displeasing none—court mediocrity, avoid originality, and sacrifice to fashion.

No one is a light unto himself, not even the sun.

How I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!