Quotes to inspire and reflect

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public’opinion.

The disadvantage of men not knowing the past is that they do not know the present. History is a hill or high point of vantage, from which alone men see the town in which they live or the age in which they are living.

The historian must not try to know what is truth, if he values his honesty; for, if he cares for his truths, he is certain to falsify his facts.

History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.

Better not be a hero than work oneself up into heroism by shouting lies.

Every hero is a Samson. The strong man succumbs to the intrigues of the weak and the many; and if in the end he loses all patience he crushes both them and himself.

A hero is a man who does what he can.

The epic disappeared along with the age of personal heroism; there can be no epic with artillery.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.

The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.

We moderns do not believe in demigods, but our smallest hero we expect to feel and act as a demigod.

No hero to me is the man who, by easy shedding of his blood, purchases fame: my hero is he who, without death, can win praise.

The heroic man does not pose; he leaves that for the man who wishes to be thought heroic.

A hero cannot be a hero unless in an heroic world.

The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.

The hero is suffered to be himself.

Heroes are very human, most of them; very easily touched by praise.

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

With him for a sire and her for a dam, / What should I be but just what I am?

Deep in the cavern of the infant’s breast / The father’s nature lurks, and lives anew.

To work hard, to live hard, to diehard, and then to go to hell after all would be too damned hard.

What is hell? Hell is oneself, / Hell is alone, the other figures in it / Merely projections.

Before the days of Kepler the heavens declared the glory of the Lord.

For when will we civilized beings become really serious? said Kierkegaard. Only when we have known hell through and through. Without this, hedonism and frivolity will diffuse hell through all our days.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars—on stars where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.

Overhead the sanctities of the stars shine forevermore,... pouring satire on the pompous business of the day which they close, and making the generations of men show slight and evanescent.

The heavens call to you, and circle around you, displaying to you their eternal splendours, and your eye gazes only to earth.

Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.

This life soon be over, I say. Heaven last all ways.

Men have feverishly conceived a heaven only to find it insipid, and a hell to find it ridiculous.

And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, / Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die, / Lift not your hands to It for help—for it / As impotently moves as you or I

Those who have had none of the cares of this life to harass and disturb them, have been obliged to have recourse to the hopes and fears of the next to vary the prospect before them.

The Christian idea of a perfect heaven that is something other than a non-existence is a contradiction in terms.

It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing, watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces.

Lleaven is large, and affords space for all modes of love and fortitude.

The wish for healing has ever been the half of health.

We are not sensible of the most perfect health, as we are of the least sickness.

Health is a precious thing, and the only one, in truth, meriting that a man should lay out, not only his time, sweat, labor and goods, but also his life itself to obtain it.

Life is not living, but living in health.

Sickness is felt, but health not at all.

The sense of wellbeing! It’s often with us / When we are young, but then it’s not noticed; / And by the time one has grown to consciousness / It comes less often.

Hatred is the coward’s revenge for being intimidated.

Enmity is catching.

The human heart as modern civilization has made it is more prone to hatred than to friendship. And it is prone to hatred because it is dissatisfied.

It is enough that one man hate another for hate to gain, little by little, all mankind.

All men naturally hate one another. They employ lust as far as possible in the service of the public weal. But this is only a pretence and a false image of love; for at bottom it is only hate.

To put more faith in lies and hate / Than truth and love is the true atheism.