Quotes
Quotes to inspire and reflect
He declares himself guilty who justifies himself before accusation.
8
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.
20
Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.
16
Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
15
Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.
6
No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.
16
Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely.
17
One must be thrust out of a finished cycle in life, and that leap [is] the most difficult to make—to part with one’s faith, one’s love, when one would prefer to renew the faith and recreate the passion.
16
Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it—torn up to irrecoverable tatters.
6
Whatever is formed for long duration arrives slowly to its maturity.
7
The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.
19
Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.
6
Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.
13
Greed’s worst point is its ingratitude.
8
For greed all nature is too little.
9
The covetous man fares worse with his passion than the poor, and the jealous man than the cuckold.
7
Care clings to wealth: the thirst for more / Grows as our fortunes grow.
22
Avarice is a cursed vice: offer a man enough gold, and he will part with his own small hoard of food, however great his hunger.
21
Riches have made more covetous men than covetousness hath made rich men.
8
Nothing in the world is so incontinent as a man’s accursed appetite.
19
If your desires be endless, your cares and fears will be so too.
7
He is not poor that hath not much, but he that craves much.
6
It is not greedy to enjoy a good dinner, any more than it is greedy to enjoy a good concert. But 1 do think there is something greedy about trying to enjoy the dinner and the concert at the same time.
8
We [Greeks] are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.
14
None think the great unhappy but the great.
15
Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.
16
Great men have all been formed either before academies or independent of them.
6
There are only two sorts of greatness: true greatness, which is of a spiritual order, and the old, old lie of world conquest. Conquest is an ersatz greatness.
13
They that stand high have many blasts to shake them.
11
The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.
7
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.
15
A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.
9
Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.
9
Men are like the stars: some generate their own light while others reflect the brilliance they receive.
13
Every great man inevitably resents a partner in greatness.
17
Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.
13
To know the great men dead is compensation for having to live with the mediocre.
11
No man was ever great by imitation.
5
He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.
9
Great men have to be lifted upon the shoulders of the whole world, in order to conceive their great ideas, or perform their great deeds.
14
No great thing is created suddenly.
11
Greatness brings no profit to people. / God indeed, when in anger, brings / greater ruin to great men’s houses.
9
When nature removes a great man, people explore the horizon for a successor; but none comes, and none will. His class is extinguished with him. In some other and quite different field, the next man will appear.
7
The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.
8
Desire of greatness is a godlike sin.
13
Let him be great, and love shall follow him.
9
Great offices will have great talents.
18
Greatness and goodness are not means, but ends.
15