Quotes to inspire and reflect

I think periods of browsing during which no occupation is imposed from without are important in youth because they give time for the formation of these apparently fugitive but really vital impressions.

A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.

Idleness is a mother. She has a son, robbery, and a daughter, hunger.

If a soldier or labourer complain of the hardship of his lot, set him to do nothing.

Idleness and pride tax with a heavier hand than kings and parliaments.

But sometimes I think that idlers seem to be a special class for whom nothing can be planned, plead as one will with them—their only contribution to the human family is to warm a seat at the common table.

It is because artists do not practise, patrons do not patronize, crowds do not assemble to reverently worship the great work of Doing Nothing, that the world has lost its philosophy and even failed to invent a new religion.

Expect poison from the standing water.

We are now again in an epoch of wars of religion, but a religion is now called an “ideology.”.

This wasted time I have found by constant experience to be as indispensable as sleep. It cannot be employed in reading, nor even in thinking upon any serious subject. It must be wasted on trifles—doing nothing. The string of the bow must be slackened, and the bow itself laid aside.

Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

At every single moment of one’s life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been.

Not one of us can lie or pretend. We’re all fixed in good faith in a certain concept of ourselves.

[Philosophy] forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.

To its own impulse every creature stirs; / Live by thy light, and earth will live by hers!

While you cannot resolve what you are, at last you will be nothing.

All great ideas are dangerous.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

An idea does not pass from one language to another without change.

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable.

If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn’t help; best to let it lie there.

Man is a fighting animal; his thoughts are his banners, and it is a failure of nerve in him if they are only thoughts.

General and abstract ideas are the source of the greatest errors of mankind.

Great ideas are not charitable.

One has to be a lowbrow, a bit of a murderer, to be a politician, ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered, for the sake of an idea, whether a good one or a bad one.

Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of 1 hought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead.

Old ideas give way slowly; for they are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits, predispositions, deeply ingrained attitudes of aversion and preference.

Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy!

It seems to be the fate of idealists to obtain what they have struggled for in a form which destroys their ideals.

It is only in marriage with the world that our ideals can bear fruit: divorced from it, they remain barren.

It is not materialism that is the chief curse of the world, as pastors teach, but idealism. Men get into trouble by taking their visions and hallucinations too seriously.

The idealist is incorrigible: if he be thrown out of his Heaven, he makes himself a suitable ideal out of Hell.

Don’t use that foreign word “ideals.” We have that excellent native word “lies.”

God, when he makes the prophet, does not unmake the man.

If two or three persons should come with a high spiritual aim and with great powers, the world would fall into their hands like a ripe peach.

When smashing monuments, save the pedestals— they always come in handy.

These, if ever, are the brave free days of destroyed landmarks, while the ingenious minds are busy inventing the forms of the new beacons which, it is consoling to think, will be set up presently in the old places.

He who lives more lives than one / More deaths than one must die.

The hypocrite who always plays one and the same part ceases at last to be a hypocrite.

That character in conversation which commonly passes for agreeable is made up of civility and falsehood.

In the mouths of many men soft words are like roses that soldiers put into the muzzles of their muskets on holidays.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtues.

It is not uncommon to charge the difference between promise and performance, between profession and reality, upon deep design and studied deceit; but the truth is, that there is very little hypocrisy in the world.

Spread yourself upon his bosom publicly, whose heart you would eat in private.

Often a noble face hides filthy ways.

The hater of property and of government takes care to have his warranty deed recorded; and the book written against fame and learning has the author’s name on the title-page.