Quotes to inspire and reflect

Is there no God, then, but at best an absentee God, sitting idle, ever since the first Sabbath, at the outside of his Universe?

When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation.

The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.

Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army.

Theist and Atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.

Out of chaos God made a world, and out of high passions comes a people.

God’s merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion.

God without the devil is dead, being alone.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

God is the perfect poet, / Who in his person acts his own creations.

We should find God in what we do know, not in what we don’t; not in outstanding problems, but in those we have already solved.

We, peopling the void air, / Make Gods to whom to impute / The ills we ought to bear; / With God and Fate to rail at, suffering easily.

The power that holds the sky’s majesty wins our worship.

Glories, like glow-worms, afar off shine bright, / But looked to near, have neither heat nor light.

The shortest way to arrive at glory would be to do that for conscience which we do for glory.

Glory and repose are things that cannot possibly inhabit in one and the same place.

A lot of young girls together is a romantic secret thing like the first sight of wild ducks at dawn.

To the ashes of the dead glory comes too late.

I cannot even pretend to feel as much interest in boys as in girls.

There is no need to waste pity on young girls who are having their moments of disillusionment,

When I give I give myself.

Surely great loving-kindness yet may go / With a little gift: all’s dear that comes from friends.

Man discovers his own wealth / when God comes to ask gifts of him.

Leave out my name from the gift / if it be a burden, / but keep my song.

An enemy’s gift is ruinous and no gift.

You pay a great deal too dear for what’s given freely.

The spirit in which a thing is given determines that in which the debt is acknowledged; it’s the intention, not the face-value of the gift, that’s weighed.

This is what is hardest: to close the open hand because one loves.

He gives only the worthless gold / Who gives from a sense of duty.

The heart and hand of those who always mete out become callous from always meting out.

Let him that desires to see others happy, make haste to give while his gift can be enjoyed, and remember that every moment of delay takes away something from the value of his benefaction.

Some people have a knack of putting upon you gifts of no real value, to engage you to substantial gratitude. We thank them for nothing.

What with your friend you nobly share, / At least you rescue from your heir.

That is the bitterness of a gift, that it deprives us of our liberty.

We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that feeds us is in some danger of being bitten.

How painful to give a gift to any person of sensibility, or of equality! It is next worst to receiving one.

To give and then not feel that one has given is the very best of all ways of giving.

Ghost, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear.

The work of bestial degradation, begun by the victorious Germans, had been carried to its conclusion by the Germans in defeat.

We Germans fear God, but nothing else in the world.

Fair and softly goes far.

I remember as a child reading or hearing the words “The Great Divide” and being stunned by the glorious sound, a proper sound for the granite backbone of a continent. I saw in my mind escarpments rising into the clouds, a kind of natural Great Wall of China.

Anyone can be heroic from time to time, but a gentleman is something you have to be all the time. Which isn't easy.

Repose and cheerfulness are the badge of the gentleman,—repose in energy.

Coffee is good for talent, but genius wants prayer.

The difference between Talent and Genius is, that Talent says things which he has never heard but once, and Genius things which he has never heard.

It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.

The deep waters of time will flow over us: only a few men of genius will lift a head above the surface, and though doomed eventually to pass into the same silence, will fight against oblivion and for a long time hold their own.