Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

When all candles be out, all cats be grey.

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.

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

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.

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

Equality consists in the same treatment of similar persons.

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 ... 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.

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

Envy’s a sharper spur than pay.

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.

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

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

We are all experiments in enthusiasms, narrow and preordained.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

I knew I was in England by the smell.