Quotes to inspire and reflect

The last pleasure in life is the sense of discharging our duty.

You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it.

must’s a schoolroom in the month of may

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one’s duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes exceedingly difficult to find this out.

1 have never met an author who admitted that people did not buy his book because it was dull.

Dullness is the coming of age of seriousness.

He had been gambling and drinking and eating now and again at the buffet tables the casinos keep heaped with food day and night, but mostly hopping himself up with good old amphetamine, cooling himself down with meprobamate, then hooking down more alcohol, until now, after sixty hours, he was slipping into the symptoms of toxic schizophrenia.

Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden.

The spirit of the world, the great calm presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of wine.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

What marriage is to morality, a properly conducted licensed liquor traffic is to sobriety.

Opiate, n. An unlocked door in the prison of Identity. It leads into the jail yard.

A bumper of good liquor / Will end a contest quicker / Than justice, judge, or vicar.

I liked the taste of beer, its live, white lather, its brass-bright depths, the sudden world through the \yet-brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.

Good’wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used.

O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains! that we should with joy, pleasance, revel, and applause transform ourselves into beasts!

Drink! for you know not whence you came, nor . why: / Drink! for you know not why you go, nor where.

Drunkenness doesn’t create vices, but it brings them to the fore.

an old stomach / reforms more whiskey drinkers / than a new resolve.

The drinking man is never less himself than during his sober intervals.

Wine gives a man nothing. It neither gives him knowledge nor wit; it only animates a man, and enables him to bring out what a dread of the company has repressed.

God made only water, but man made wine.

Who, after wine, talks of war’s hardships or of poverty?

“Drink took to me,” said Simple. “Whiskey just naturally likes me but beer likes me better.”

What does drunkenness not accomplish? It unlocks secrets, confirms our hopes, urges the indolent into battle, lifts the burden from anxious minds, teaches new arts.

Wine can of their wits the wise beguile, / Make the sage frolic, and the serious smile.

Wine is like rain: when it falls on the mire it but makes it the fouler, / But when it strikes the good soil wakes it to beauty and bloom.

It’s the wise man who stays home when he’s drunk.

Intemperance is the only vulgarity.

The secret of drunkenness is, that it insulates us in thought, whilst it unites us in feeling.

Under a bad cloak there is often a good drinker.

Drink moderately, for drunkenness neither keeps a secret, nor observes a promise.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, / But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy.

[TJhose running tights the young women wear now, so they look like spacewomen, raspberry red and electric green so tight they show every muscle right into the crack between the buttocks, what is the point of them? Display. Young animals need to dis- play.

Contentment preserves one even from catching a cold. Idas a woman who knew she was well-dressed ever caught cold?

A lady wants to be dressed exactly like everybody else but she gets pretty up- / set if she sees anybody else dressed exactly like / her.

Fine clothes are good only as they supply the want of other means of procuring respect.

A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one.

Probably every new and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in, fell a trifle short of the wearer’s expectation.

We know, Mr. Weller—we, who are men of the world—that a good uniform must work its way with the women, sooner or later.

Whatever doesn’t really happen is dreamed at night. It happens to one if it doesn't happen to another, tomorrow if not today, or a century hence if not next year.

Action is limited and relative. Unlimited and absolute is the vision of him who sits at ease and watches, who walks in loneliness and dreams.

Dreaming is not merely an act of communication (or coded communication, if you like); it is also an aesthetic activity, a game of the imagination, a game that is a value in itself.

There is a prodigious selfishness in dreams: they live perfectly deaf and invulnerable amid the cries of the real world.

The waking have one world in common; sleepers have each a private world of his own.

We often forget our dreams so speedily: if we cannot catch them as they are passing out at the door, we never set eyes on them again.

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

Judge of your natural character by what you do in your dreams.