Quotes to inspire and reflect

It is a part of English hypocrisy—or English reserve—that, whilst we are fluent enough in grumbling about small inconveniences, we insist on making light of any great difficulties or griefs that may beset us.

It is curious how often one prefers his enemies to his friends.

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man’s life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

If you have an enemy, do not requite him evil with good, for that would put him to shame. Rather prove that he did you some good.

Invite your friend to dinner; have nothing to do with your enemy.

Your worst enemy / Becomes your best friend, once he’s underground.

There’s nothing like the sight / Of an old enemy down on his luck.

We may be masters of our every lot / By bearing it.

Endurance is the crowning quality, / And patience all the passion of great hearts.

To bear lightly the neck’s yoke / brings strength; but kicking / against the goads is the way / of failure.

What is there more of in the world than anything else? Ends.

The man who sticks it out against his fate / shows spirit, but the spirit of a fool.

God alone can finish.

Men achieve a certain greatness unawares, when working to another aim.

The secret of life is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.

It was not clear how it would end. In nineteenth- century novels, they get married. In twentieth-century novels, they get divorced. Can you have an ending in which they do neither?

The heart is forever inexperienced.

Emotion is primarily about nothing, and much of it remains about nothing to the end.

Pity me that the heart is slow to learn / What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

One of the effects of safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions seem somewhat disgusting.

The heart errs like the head; its errors are not any the less fatal, and we have more trouble getting free of them because of their sweetness.

The important thing is being capable of emotions, but to experience only one's own would be a sorry limitation.

The English are loth to express their feelings, but in my stall in the choir I could feel the pent-up, passionate emotion, and also the fear of the congregation, not of death or wounds or material loss, but of defeat and the final ruin of Britain.

Let my heart be wise. / It is the gods’ best gift.

It is as healthy to enjoy sentiment as to enjoy jam.

Man is, and was always, a block-head and dullard; much readier to feel and digest, than to think and consider.

A thing said walks in immortality / if it has been said well.

We have hearts within, / Warm, live, improvident, indecent hearts.

Continuous eloquence wearies.

There is no more sovereign eloquence than the truth in indignation.

Fte that has no silver in his purse should have silver on his tongue.

The eloquent man is he who is no beautiful speaker, but who is inwardly and desperately drunk with a certain belief.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed.

To win one’s joy through struggle is better than to yield to melancholy.

Care and diligence bring luck.

Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to overeducate ourselves.

Try first thyself, and after call in God; / For to the worker God himself lends aid.

[Ejverybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching—that is really what our enthusiasm for education has come to.

If you meet at dinner a man who has spent his life in educating himself...you rise from table richer, and conscious that a high ideal has for a moment touched and sanctifed your days. But oh! to sit next a man who spent his life in trying to educate others! What a dreadful experience that is! How appalling is that ignorance which is the inevitable result of the fatal habit of imparting opinions!

Children have a natural antipathy to books— handicraft should be the basis of education. Boys and girls should be taught to use their hands to make something, and they would be less apt to destroy and be mischievous.

Education—whether its object be children or adults, individuals or an entire people—consists in creating motives.

So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called an education.

We need to unlearn some of our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves.

What we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the obsolete fictitious for the contemporary real.

The great difficulty in education is to get experience out of ideas.

Education, which was at first made universal in order that all might be able to read and write, has been found capable of serving quite other purposes. By instilling nonsense it unifies populations and generates collective enthusiasm.

Education is the leading human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them; and these two objects are always attainable together, and by the same means; the training which makes men happiest in themselves also makes them most serviceable to others.