Quotes to inspire and reflect

The perfect human being is uninteresting—the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.

“Pity for all” would be hardness and tyranny toward you, my dear neighbor.

He is not good himself who speaks well of everybody alike.

In the beginning, before the arrival of the white men, I had considered myself neutral. I had wanted neither side to win, neither the army nor the rebels. As it turned out, both sides lost.

What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity.

We feel and know that we are eternal.

All the doctrines that have flourished in the world about immortality have hardly affected men’s natural sentiment in the face of death.

If you question any candid person who is no longer young, he is very likely to tell you that, having tasted iife in this world, he has no wish to begin again as a “new boy" in another.

It has been said that the immortality of the soul is a “grand peut-etre”—but it is still a grand one. Everybody clings to it—the stupidest, and dullest, and wickedest of human bipeds is still persuaded that he is immortal.

Should this my firm persuasion of the soul’s immortality prove to be a mere delusion, it is at least a pleasing delusion, and I will cherish it to my latest breath.

Immortality makes sense only when the individual soul can be thought of as merging into a great collective mush of sainthood. If we take anything with us into the next world, it is not what survives in the memories of our relicts.

A nation, like a tree, does not thrive well till it is engraffed with a foreign stock.

How shall one who is so weak in his childhood become really strong when he grows older? We only change our fancies.

There are cases in which the blade springs, but the plant does not go on to flower. There are cases where it flowers, but no fruit is subsequently produced.

The wisest man is just a boy / who grieves that he’s grown up.

We are like thistle-down blown about by the wind—up and down, here and there—but not one in a thousand ever getting beyond seed-hood.

Universities are filled with poets and novelists conducting demure and careful lives in imitation of Eliot and Forster and those others who (through what seems to be have been discretion) made it.

We all begin life as parasites within the mother, and writers begin their existence imitatively, within the body of letters.

The instant / trivial as it is / is all we have / unless—unless / things the imagination feeds upon, / the scent of the rose, / startle us anew.

No living person is sunk so low as not to be imitated by somebody.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.

Imagination is more robust in proportion as reasoning power is weak.

I have imagination, and nothing that is real is alien to me.

Such tricks hath strong imagination, / That, if it would but apprehend some joy, / It comprehends some bringer of that joy; / Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

In the world of the imagination, anything goes that’s imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.

Imagination, that dost so abstract us / That we are not aware, not even when / A thousand trumpets sound about our ears!

The imagination and the senses cannot be gratified at the same time.

Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense.

Imagination, n. A warehouse of facts, with poet and liar in joint ownership.

A popular cliche in philosophy says that science is pure analysis or reductionism, like taking the rainbow to pieces; and art is pure synthesis, putting the ram- bow together. This is not so. All imagination begins by analyzing nature.

Somewhere along the line I knew there d be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives not by truth but by make-believe.

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

We wake from one dream into another dream.

A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns.

Every age is fed on illusions, lest men should renounce life early and the human race come to an end.

He who would be cured of ignorance must confess it.

There is that indescribable freshness and unconsciousness about an illiterate person that humbles and mocks the power of the noblest expressive genius.

He that had never seen a river, imagined the first he met with to be the sea.

He that knows little often repeats it.

The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.

He that knows least commonly presumes most.

Ignorance is always ready to admire itself, / Procure yourself critical friends.

all ignorance toboggans into know / and trudges up to ignorance again.

Wisdom is prevented by ignorance, and delusion is the result.

Idleness was a sin not against the self or against God but against Mammon and Pierce & Pierce.