Quotes to inspire and reflect

There is no growth except in the fulfillment of obligations.

If you are chosen town clerk, forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego this summer;

A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.

If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.

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

What is the use of such terrible diligence as many tire themselves out with, if they always postpone their exchange of smiles with Beauty and Joy to cling to irksome duties and relations?

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

God made only water, but man made wine.

“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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Intemperance is the only vulgarity.

[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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.