Quotes to inspire and reflect

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 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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

God alone can finish.

The heart is forever inexperienced.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Continuous eloquence wearies.

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

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.

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

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

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

Care and diligence bring luck.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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