Quotes to inspire and reflect

A dream is always simmering below the conventional surface of speech and reflection.

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand: / Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be, a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen.

No man will be found in whose mind airy notions do not sometime tyrannize, and force him to hope or fear beyond the limits of sober probability.

He who passes not his days in the realm of dreams is the slave of the days.

A fantasy can be equivalent to a paradise and if the fantasy passes, better yet, because eternal paradise would be very boring.

Dreams are the subtle Dower / That make us rich an Hour—- / Then fling us poor / Out of the purple door.

Few have greater riches than the joy / That comes to us in visions, / In dreams which nobody can take away.

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.

[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.

There is something sad and terrifying about big families.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Fame’s carapace does not allow for easy breathing.

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

Fame sometimes hath created something of nothing.

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

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

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

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.