Quotes to inspire and reflect

Belief in a Divine mission is one of the many forms of certainty that have afflicted the human race.

An infallible method of making fanatics is to persuade before you instruct.

He that rides his hobby gently must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard.

There is no strong performance without a little fanaticism in the performer.

There is something sad and terrifying about big families.

[T]he family in the West is finished.... its origin was economic, not biological.... the odd group of strangers that make up every family no longer have any reason to live together, to suffer from one another’s jagged edges.

One would be in less danger / From the wiles of the stranger / If one’s own kin and kith / Were more fun to be with.

Sacred family!... The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.

The family the soul wants is a felt network of relationship, an evocation of a certain kind of interconnection that grounds, roots, and nestles.

There is little less trouble in governing a private family than a whole kingdom.

Natural affection is a prejudice: for though we have cause to love our nearest connections better than others, we have no reason to think them better than others.

When you deal with your brother, be pleasant, but get a witness.

The parents’ age must be remembered, both for joy and anxiety.

As states subsist in part by keeping their weaknesses from being known, so is it the quiet of families to have their chancery and their parliament within doors, and to compose and determine all emergent differences there.

Cruel is the strife of brothers.

The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself.

When brothers agfee, no fortress is so strong as their common life.

Though the familiar use of things about us take off our wonder, yet it cures not our ignorance.

Though familiarity may not breed contempt, it takes off the edge of admiration.

The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be seen if the eye is too near.

If you wish to obtain a great name or to found an establishment, be completely mad; but be sure that your madness corresponds with the turn and temper of your age.

A guy at the bar, well-dressed, came up behind Cassius [Muhammad Ali] and touched him lightly at about the level of the sixth rib and went back to the bar and told his girl, “That’s Cassius Clay. I just touched him, no kidding."

Fame has also this great drawback, that if we pursue it we must direct our lives in such a way as to please the fancy of men, avoiding what they dislike and seeking what is pleasing to them.

Fame, that public destruction of one in process of becoming, into whose building-ground the mob breaks, displacing his stones.

The charm of fame is so great that we like every object to which it is attached, even death.

Unblemished let me live, or die unknown; / O grant an honest fame, or grant me none!

We are more solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak.

Fame’s carapace does not allow for easy breathing.

When I hear a man applauded by the mob I always feel a pang of pity for him. All he has to do to be hissed is to live long enough.

The dispersing and scattering our names into many mouths, we call making them more great.

There is no business in this world so troublesome as the pursuit of fame: life is over before you have hardly begun your work.

The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.

Men have a solicitude about fame; and the greater share they have of it, the more afraid they are of losing it.

VVe imagine that the admiration of the works of celebrated men has become common, because the admiration of their names has become so.

For a good man fame is always a problem.

Your first realization when you become an important person is that all day and all night, whatever the circumstances, people want to hear you talk about yourself.

Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing.

All fame is dangerous: good bringeth envy; bad, shame.

Fame is a bee. / It has a song—/ It has a sting—/ Ah, too, it has a wing.

How dreary—to be—Somebody! / How public— like a Frog— / To tell your name—the livelong June—/To an admiring Bog!

A man’s renown is like the hue of grass, / Which comes and goes.

Celebrity: I picture myself as a marble bust with legs to run everywhere.

If men of eminence are exposed to censure on one hand, they are as much liable to flattery on the other. If they receive reproaches which are not due to them, they likewise receive praises which they do not deserve.

Men prominent in life are mostly hard to converse with. They lack small-talk, and at the same time one doesn’t like to confront them with their own great themes.

Faith is, before all and above all, wishing God may exist.

Faith consists in believing not what seems true, but what seems false to our understanding.

Proofs are the last thing looked for by a truly religious mind which feels the imaginative fitness of its faith.

Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.