Quotes to inspire and reflect

Every age, / Through being beheld too close, is ill- discerned / By those who have not lived past it.

The "times,” “the age,” what is that, but a few profound persons and a few active persons who epitomize the times?

Every age has its pleasures, its style of wit, and its own ways.

The principle of equality does not destroy the imagination, but lowers its flight to the level of the earth.

In America everybody is of opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors.

When none but the wealthy had watches, they were almost all very good ones: few are now made which are worth much, but everybody has one in his pocket.

Inside the polling booth every American man and woman stands as the equal of every other American man and woman. There they have no superiors. There they have no masters save their own minds and consciences.

Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity—and finally liberty is bestowed by sleep.

It is better that some should be unhappy than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

It is the American vice, the democratic disease which expresses its tyranny by reducing everything unique to the level of the herd.

When all candles be out, all cats be grey.

Woman has always been man’s dependent, if not his slave; the two sexes have never shaped the world in equality. And even today woman is heavily handicapped, though her situation is beginning to change.

Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.

The democrats think that as they are equal they ought to be equal in all things.

There is not a passion so strongly rooted in the human heart as envy.

Envy ... is one form of a vice, partly moral, partly intellectual, which consists in seeing things never in themselves but only in their relations.

Even success softens not the heart of the envious.

Our nature holds so much envy and malice that our pleasure in our own advantages is not so great as our distress at others’.

Envy’s a sharper spur than pay.

All envy is proportionate to desire; we are uneasy at the attainments of another, according as we think

Nothing sharpens sight like envy.

Envy is the tax which all distinction must pay.

Envy is everywhere. / Who is without envy? And most people / Are unaware or unashamed of being envious.

He that cannot possibly mend his own case will do what he can to impair another’s.

A grateful environment is a substitute for happiness. It can quicken us from without as a fixed hope and affection, or the consciousness of a right life, can quicken us from within.

In few men is it part of nature to respect / a friend's prosperity without begrudging him.

We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained.

Enthusiasm, n. A distemper of youth, curable by small doses of repentance in connection with outward applications of experience.

On the neck of the young man sparkles no gem so gracious as enterprise.

He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.

The flesh is sad, alas, and I’ve read all the books.

None will improve your lot / If you yourselves do not.

You are the slaves of laws. The French are slaves of men.

In England the rich own the poor and the men own the women.

Go anywhere in England, where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real centre of the household.

There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it; but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle.

England is the paradise of individuality, eccentricity, heresy, anomalies, hobbies, and humours.

In its attitude towards Dickens the English public has always been a little like the elephant which feels a blow with a walking-stick as a delightful tickling.

If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens’s proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife—not exactly a representative cross- section of the English working class.

The Englishman, be it noted, seldom resorts to violence; when he is sufficiently goaded he simply opens up, like the oyster, and devours his adversary.

I knew I was in England by the smell.

It is good to be on your guard against an Englishman who speaks French perfectly; he is very likely to be a card-sharper or an attache in the diplomatic service.

The difference between the vanity of a Frenchman and an Englishman seems to be this: the one thinks everything right that is French, the other thinks everything wrong that is not English.

An Englishman is never so natural as when he’s holding his tongue.

“It is in bad taste,” is the most formidable word an Englishman can pronounce.

The Englishman walks before the law like a trained horse in the circus. He has the sense of legality in his bones, in his muscles.

The English have a scornful insular way / Of calling the French light.

The maxim of the British people is “Business as usual.”