Quotes to inspire and reflect

Nothing has happened to you unless you make much of it.

No man alive can say, This shall not happen to me.

When one has finished building one’s house, one suddenly realizes that in the process one has learned something that one really needed to know in the worst way—before one began.

Men use a new lesson or experience later on as a ploughshare or perhaps also as a weapon; women at once make it into an ornament.

The burnt child, urged by rankling ire, / Can hardly wait to get back at the fire.

Many people know so little about what is beyond their short range of experience. They look within themselves—and find nothing! Therefore they conclude that there is nothing outside themselves, either.

Secondhand experience breaks down a block from the car lot.

From their own experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.

Scalded cats fear even cold water.

Experience, travel— / These are an education in themselves.

Experience is the only teacher, and we get his lesson indifferently in any school.

When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it.

The authentic insight and experience of any human soul, were it but insight and experience in hewing of wood and drawing of water, is real knowledge, a real possession and acquirement.

In the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.

In every sort of danger there are various ways of winning through, if one is ready to do and say anything whatever.

Policy sits above conscience.

Philanthropic and religious bodies do not commonly make their executive officers out of s aints.

a certain / alloy of expediency improves the / gold of morality and makes / it wear all tbe longer.

Oft expectation fails and most oft there / Where most it promises, and oft it hits / Where hope is coldest and despair most fits.

In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.

Even if it is to be, what end do you serve by running to meet distress?

The best part of our lives we pass in counting on what is to come.

Lighten grief with hopes of a brighter morrow; / Temper joy, in fear of a change of fortune.

The hours we pass with happy prospects in view are more pleasing than those crowned with fruition.

Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Such is the first principle of existentialism.

Being is the great explainer.

That I exist is a perpetual surprise which is life.

We spend our lives talking about this mystery: our life.

A sanctity hangs about the sources of our being, whether physical, social, or imaginary.

As long as any man exists, there is some need of him; let him fight for his own.

Every life is its own excuse for being.

Some men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work.

Why does one exist? That’s not my problem. One does exist. The thing to do is to take no notice but go at it on the run and to keep on going right on until you die.

What is worth doing is worth the trouble of asking somebody to do it.

People’s sympathies seem generally to be with the fire so long as no one is in danger of being burned.

Its just as unpleasant to get more than you bargain for as to get less.

Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink.

The heart of man does not tolerqte an absence of the excellent and supreme.

The best of things, beyond their measure, cloy.

We need someone, I say, on whom our character may mould itself: you’ll never make the crooked straight without a ruler.

One shining quality lends a lustre to another, or hides some glaring defect.

Exaggeration is a prodigality of the judgment which shows the narrowness of one’s knowledge or one’s taste.

The tide of evolution carries everything before it, thoughts no less than bodies, and persons no less than nations.

We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands.

Darwinian Man, though well-behaved, / At best is only a monkey shaved!

The preoccupation with the choice of a mate both by male and female I regard as a continuing echo of the major selective force by which we have evolved.

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.