Quotes to inspire and reflect

Luck never made a man wise.

Fortune's not content with knocking a man down; she sends him spinning head over heels, crash upon crash.

Ill fortune never crushed that man whom good fortune deceived not.

What men call luck / Is the prerogative of valiant souls, / The fealty life pays its rightful kings.

Fortune, thou hadst no deity, if men / Had wisdom.

Very few live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate; and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own.

Ah Fortune, what god is more cruel to us than thou! Flow thou delightest ever to make sport of human life!

Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great.

When you find Fortune favorable, stride boldly forward, for she favors the bold, and being a woman, the young.

Some folk want their luck buttered.

The man who glories in his luck / May be overthrown by destiny.

Fortune pays you sometimes for the intensity of her favors by the shortness of their duration. She soon tires of carrying any one long on her shoulders.

Fortune always will confer an aura / Of worth, unworthily; and in this world / The lucky person passes for a genius.

None can hold fortune still and make it last.

Don’t envy men / Because they seem to have a run of luck, / Since luck’s a nine day’s wonder. Wait their end.

To believe in luck, if it were not a solecism so to use the word believe, is skepticism.

Heaven’s help is better-than early rising.

Who has good luck is good, / Who has bad luck is bad.

Fortune is like the market, where many times, if you can stay a little, the price will fall.

Did man e’er live / Saw priest or woman yet forgive?

Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is again made clean.

Forgotten is forgiven.

Forgiveness to the injured does belong; / For they ne’er pardon who have done the wrong.

Reason to rule but mercy to forgive: / The first is law, the last prerogative.

Ants and savages put strangers to death.

Everything foreign is respected, partly because it comes from afar, partly because it is ready made and perfect. '

Not hammer-strokes, but dance of the water sings the pebbles into perfection.

At twelve noon/The natives swoon/ And no further work is done/ But mad dogs and Englishmen/Go out in the midday sun.

Against naked force the only possible defense is naked force. The aggressor makes the rules for such a war; the defenders have no alternative but matching destruction with more destruction, slaughter with greater slaughter.

Do not expect justice where might is right.

Justice without force is impotent, force without justice is tyranny.... Not being able to make what is just strong, we make what was strong just.

When one by force subdues men, they do not submit to him in heart. They submit because their strength is not adequate to resist.

The use of force alone is temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of

Force works on servile natures, not the free.

Always the dulness of the fool is the whetstone of the wits.

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

To never see a fool you lock yourself in your room and smash the looking-glass.

The fool is not the man who merely does foolish things. The fool is the man who does not know enough to cash in on his foolishness.

Every man hath a fool in his sleeve.

Tis wisdom sometimes to seem a fool.

The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so Holy.

Wise men ... learn by others’ harms, fools scarcely by their own.

Give me the young man who has brains enough to make a fool of himself!

It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.

What is life but a'series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do.

If you think my acts are foolishness / the foolishness may be in a fool’s eye.

A way foolishness has of revenging itself is to excommunicate the world.

Tell him to be a fool every so often / and to have no shame over having been a fool / yet learning something over every folly.