Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is the heart always that sees, before the head can see.

They [the police] learned something from them Harlem riots. They used to beat your head right in public, but now they only beat it after they get you down to the station house.

Intimacy begins with oneself. It does no good to try to find intimacy with friends, lovers and family if you are starting out from alienation and division within yourself.

After the meal, the couple retired to their bedroom. Man and wife don’t usually lie together in the daytime, but when he went outside to close the shutters, she did not protest. As soon as he put his arm around her she was aroused, like all adolescent— since a woman who has not been pregnant, remains virginal forever.

When married people don’t get on they can separate, but if they’re not married it's impossible. It's a tie that only death can sever.

A man knows his companion in a long journey and a little inn.

All couples must bear the strain of getting acquainted, having been, up to then, merely intimate.

I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says: “Yes; the little ones does."

The greatest need of the contemporary international system is an agreed concept of order.

Amity itself can only be maintained by reciprocal respect, and true friends are punctilious equals.

In relations with many domestically weak countries, a radio transmitter can be a more effective form of pressure than a squadron of B-52s.

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

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

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.

An ally need not own the land he helps.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

Intelligence is quickness in seeing things as they are.

A good mind possesses a kingdom.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

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.

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

Intellectuals, generally, no longer take jazz seriously.

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

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.