Quotes to inspire and reflect

In order to judge properly, one must get away somewhat from what one is judging, after having loved it.

Rightness of judgment is bitterness to the heart.

In judgement be ye not too confident, / Even as a man who will appraise his corn / When standing in a field, ere it is ripe.

For all right judgment of any man or thing it is useful, nay, essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.

Nothing, it appears to me, is of greater value in a man than the power of judgment; and the man who has it may be compared to a chest filled with books, for he is the son of nature and the father of art.

I do not judge men by anything they can do. Their greatest deed is the impression they make on me.

Do not judge, and you will never be mistaken.

When we come to judge others it is not by ourselves as we really are that we judge them, but by an image that we have formed of ourselves from which we have left out everything that offends our vanity or would discredit us in the eyes of the world.

Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.

Every man is entitled to be valued by his best moment.

The worthy administrators of justice are like a cat set to take care of a cheese, lest it should be gnawed by the mice. One bite of the cat does more damage to the cheese than twenty mice can do.

The judge should not be young; he should have learned to know evil, not from his own soul, but from late and long observation of the nature of evil in others.

That judges of important causes should hold office for life is a disputable thing, for the mind grows old as well as the body.

To an incompetent judge I must not lie, but I may be silent; to a competent I must answer.

What hunger is in relation to food, zest is in relation to life.

Live thy life as it were spoil and pluck the joys that fly.

Exuberance is better than taste.

My father was the Jewish half of the family, yet it was my mother who taught me to have pride in that tradition.

A Jewish man with parents alive is a fifteen-year- old boy, and will remain a fifteen-year-old boy till they die.

The Jews generally give value. They make you pay; but they deliver the goods. In my experience the men who want something for nothing are invariably Christians.

From the beginning, the Christian was the theorizing Jew; consequently, the Jew is the practical Christian.

Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.

[Jesus], a man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

It is not love that is blind, but jealousy.

Jealousy’s a proof of love, / But ’tis a weak and unavailing medicine; / It puts out the disease and makes it show, / But has no power to cure.

Jealousy is not at all low, but it catches us humbled and bowed down, at first sight.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in consequence.

Jealousy is that pain which a man feels from the apprehension that he is not equally beloved by the person whom he entirely loves.

too many creatures / both insects and humans / estimate their own value / by the amount of minor irritation / they are able to cause / to greater personalities than themselves.

To great evils we submit; we resent little provocations.

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages—leaf after leaf—never re-turning one.

A word and a stone let go cannot be called back.

Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find we have lost the future.

Impiety, n. Your irreverence toward my deity.

Life finds its wealth by the claims of the world, and its worth by the claims of love.

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.

Better be left by twenty dears / Than lie in a loveless bed; / Better a loaf that’s wet with tears, / Than cold, unsalted bread.

Love, children, and work are the great sources of fertilizing contact between the individual and the rest of the world.

My trade and art is to live,.

The moment one is on the side of life “peace and security” drop out of consciousness. The only peace, the only security, is in fulfillment.

Life without absorbing occupation is hell—joy consists in forgetting life.

There is certainly no greater happiness than to be able to look back on a life usefully and virtuously employed, to trace our own progress in existence, by such tokens as excite neither shame nor sorrow.

Be a football to Time and Chance, the more kicks, the better, so that you inspect the whole game and know its utmost law.

On Wall Street, he and a few others—how many?—three hundred, four hundred, five hundred?—had become precisely that...Masters of the Universe. There was...no limit whatsoever!

It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms.

Tis sweet to know that stocks will stand / When we with daisies lie, / That commerce will continue, / And trades as briskly fly.

Women, as most susceptible, are the best index of the coming hour.

I thought of the nameless inventor of the bathtub. I was somehow sure it was a woman. And was the inventor of the bathtub plug a man?