Quotes to inspire and reflect

Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.

If you expect the wise man to be as angry as the baseness of crimes requires, then he must not only be angry but go insane.

The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us.

Evil alone has oil for every wheel.

What we most want to ask of our Maker is an unfolding of the divine purpose in putting human beings into conditions in which such numbers of them would be sure to go wrong.

It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that dwells within others.

Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

The man who does evil to another does evil to himself, / and the evil counsel is most evil for him who counsels it.

Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to practically neglect since early childhood.

The Devil gets up to the belfry by the vicar’s skirts.

Evil men by their own nature cannot ever prosper.

Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.

By a small sample we may judge of the whole piece.

Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor.

How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.

The great events of one’s life often leave one unmoved: they pass out of consciousness, and, when one thinks of them, become unreal. Even the scarlet flowers of passion seem to grow in the same meadow as the poppies of oblivion. But the little things, the things of no moment, remain with us.

Nothing befalls us that is not of the nature of ourselves. There comes no adventure but wears to our soul the shape of our everyday thoughts.

The soul contains the event that shall befall it, for the event is only the actualization of its thoughts; and what we pray to ourselves for is always granted.

Who shrinks from knowledge of his calamities but aggravates his fear; troubles half seen do torture all the more.

Often do the spirits / Of great events stride on before the events, / And in today already walks tomorrow.

If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie.

It is the wise man's part / to leave in darkness everything that is ugly.

He was fairly happy, except that, like many people living in Europe, he would rather have been in America, and he had discovered writing.

We go to Europe to be Americanized.

The surest sign of the estrangement of the opinions of two persons is when they both say something ironical to each other and neither of them feels the irony.

A broken friendship may be soldered, but will never be sound.

It is always fair sailing, when you escape evil.

At best, the renewal of broken relations is a nervous matter.

A man trying to escape never thinks himself sufficiently concealed.

The man does better who runs from disaster than he who is caught by it.

We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance [Dunkirk] the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations.

The efforts which we make to escape from our destiny only serve to lead us into it.

Those that fly, may fight again, / Which he can never do that’s slain. / Hence timely running’s no mean part / Of conduct, in the martial art.

The progress of rivers to the ocean is not so rapid as that of man to error.

Who can deny that all men are violent lovers of truth, when we see them so positive in their errors, which they will maintain out of their zeal to truth, although they contradict themselves every day of their lives?

Error flies from mouth to mouth, from pen to pen, and to destroy it takes ages.

People seldom learn from the mistakes of others—not because they deny the value of the past, but because they are faced with new problems.

Were half the power that fills the world with terror, / Were half the wealth bestowed on camps and courts, / Given to redeem the human mind from error, / There were no need of arsenals or forts.

No doubt about it: error is the rule, truth is the accident of error.

Truth is a good dog; but beware of barking too close to the heels of an error, lest you get your brains kicked out.

The Errors of a Wise Man make your Rule / Rather than the Perfections of a Fool.

Any man can make mistakes, but only an idiot persists in his error.

We live in the age of the overworked and the undereducated.

The errors of young men are the ruin of business, but the errors of aged men amount to this, that more might have been done, or sooner.

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population re-act to the material events which they encounter.

The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next.

Every epoch, under names more or less specious, has deified its peculiar errors.

Every age thinks its battle the most important of all.