Quotes to inspire and reflect

What men have seen they know; / But what shall come hereafter / No man before the event can see, / Nor what end waits for him.

The future enters into us in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.

People live for the morrow, because the day-after- to-morrow is doubtful.

We are never present with, but always beyond ourselves; fear, desire, hope, still push us on toward the future.

Morning comes whether you set the alarm or not.

Do we not all spend the greater part of our lives under the shadow of an event that has not yet come to pass?

Only mothers can think of the future—because they give birth to it in their children.

He that fears not the future may enjoy the present.

If a man carefully examine his thoughts he will be surprised to find how much he lives in the future. His well-being is always ahead. Such a creature is probably immortal.

What we look for does not come to pass; / God finds a way for what none foresaw.

Future, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

Funerals are pretty compared to death.

A funeral isn’t for the dead. You’ll simply be a stage set for a kind of festival maybe. And besides, you won’t even be there.

The only way to have a funeral is to invite everyone who ever knew the person and just wait for the accident to happen—somebody who comes in out of the blue and says the truth. Everything else is table manners.

The eulogist spoke charmingly, without a trace of sadness, almost as though he were preparing to present the corpse in the casket with a large check rather than to usher it on to the crematorium.

One ought to go to a funeral instead of to church when one feels the need of being uplifted. People have on good black clothes, and they take off their hats and look at the coffin, and behave serious and reverent, and nobody dares to make, a bad joke.

The chief mourner does not always attend the funeral.

Funeral, n. A pageant whereby we attest our respect for the dead by enriching the undertaker, and strengthen our grief by an expenditure that deepens our groans and doubles our tears.

I suppose she only wanted what she couldn’t have. Well, people were that way.

Spare me the whispering, crowded loom, / The friends who come and gape and go, / The ceremonious air of gloom— / All, which makes death a hideous show.

Not to get what you have set your heart on is almost as bad as getting nothing at all.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

I am a hoarder of two things: documents and trusted friends.

I’m back with my own kind of people here now, the bums and drinkers and no goods and it is a fine thing.

To throw away / an honest friend is, as it were, to throw / your life away.

I cannot love a friend whose love is words.

I only asked my friends to be friendly and polite,/! found them indifferent and censorious;/The one 1 left to silence, the other to reproach:/God send me over all such friends victorious.

A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities.

To cement a new friendship, especially between foreigners or persons of a different social world, a spark with which both were secretly charged must fly from person to person, and cut across the accidents of place and time.

No enemy is so annoying as one who was a friend, or still is a friend, and there are many more of these than one would suspect.

Love is rarer than genius itself. And friendship is rarer than love. x

It is characteristic of spontaneous friendship to take on first, without enquiry and almost at first sight, the unseen doings and unspoken sentiments of our friends; the parts known give us evidence enough that the unknown parts cannot be much amiss.

A man of active and resilient mind outwears his friendships just as certainly as he outwears his love affairs, his politics and his epistemology.

Friendship is a contract in which we render small services in expectation of big ones.

It’s no good trying to keep up old friendships. It’s painful for both sides. The fact is, one grows out of people, and the only thing is to face it.

Let us make clear that we will never turn our back on our steadfast friends in Israel, whose adherence to the democratic way must be admired by all friends of freedom.

Friendship is seldom lasting but between equals, or where the superiority on one side is reduced by some equivalent advantage on the other.

That friendship may be at once fond and lasting, there must not only be equal virtue on each part, but virtue of the same kind; not only the same end must be proposed, but the same means must be approved by both.

Neither make thy friend equal to a brother; but if thou shalt have made him so, be not the first to do him wrong.

Friends are to be feared, not so much for what they make us do as for what they keep us from doing.

We often choose a friend as we do a mistress— for no particular excellence in themselves, but merely from some circumstance that flatters our self-love.

Women made such swell friends. Awfully swell. In the first place, you had to be in love with a woman to have a bsais of friendship.

True friendship is self-love at second-hand.

Make all good men your well-wishers, and then, in the years’ steady sifting, / Some of them turn into friends. Friends are the sunshine of life.

Friends provoked become the bitterest of enemies.

Friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil. Tis the sole remedy against misfortune, the very ventilation of the soul.

Few are the friends of a man's self, most those of his circumstances.

I loathe a friend whose gratitude grows old, / a friend who takes his friend's prosperity / but will not voyage with him in his grief.