Quotes to inspire and reflect

Man like every other animal is by nature indolent. If nothing spurs him on, then he will hardly think, and will behave from habit like an automaton.

Habit creates the appearance of justice; progress has no greater enemy than habit.

Nothing more unqualifies a man to act with prudence than a misfortune that is attended with shame and guilt.

The evolution from happiness to habit is one of death’s best weapons.

I have never smuggled anything in my life. Why, then, do I feel an uneasy sense of guilt on approaching a customs barrier?

Each of us when he appears before his fellows is clothed in a certain dignity. But every man knows what unconfessable things pass within the secrecy of his own heart.

This is his first punishment, that by the verdict of his own heart no guilty man is acquitted.

There is a sort of man who pays no attention to his good actions, but is tormented by his bad ones. This is the type that most often writes about himself.

He declares himself guilty who justifies himself before accusation.

Where guilt is, rage and courage doth abound.

Guilt is ever at a loss, and confusion waits upon it; when innocence and bold truth are always ready for expression.

Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment: only there does its satisfaction lie.

Manhood and sagacity ripen of themselves; it suffices not to repress or distort them.

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.

No single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born.

Life is cut to allow for growth ... one may vigorously put on weight before one fills it out entirely.

Whatever is formed for long duration arrives slowly to its maturity.

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.

The child is not a prisoner of its inheritance; it holds its inheritance as a new creation which its future actions will unfold.

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.

Though statisticians in our time have never kept the score, Man wants a great deal here below and Woman even more.

Men hate the individual whom they call avaricious only because nothing can be gained from him.

Greed’s worst point is its ingratitude.

For greed all nature is too little.

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.

The covetous man fares worse with his passion than the poor, and the jealous man than the cuckold.

Care clings to wealth: the thirst for more / Grows as our fortunes grow.

Nothing in the world is so incontinent as a man’s accursed appetite.

Riches have made more covetous men than covetousness hath made rich men.

If your desires be endless, your cares and fears will be so too.

He is not poor that hath not much, but he that craves much.

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.

None think the great unhappy but the great.

We [Greeks] are lovers of the beautiful, yet simple in our tastes, and we cultivate the mind without loss of manliness.

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.

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.

They that stand high have many blasts to shake them.

Great men have all been formed either before academies or independent of them.

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

A great man need not be virtuous, nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive luminous character.

Because a man can write great works he is none the less a man.

All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

Every great man inevitably resents a partner in greatness.

Men are like the stars: some generate their own light while others reflect the brilliance they receive.

No man was ever great by imitation.

Great men too make mistakes, and many among them do it so often that one is almost tempted to call them little men.

To know the great men dead is compensation for having to live with the mediocre.

He who comes up to his own idea of greatness must always have had a very low standard of it in his mind.