Quotes to inspire and reflect

She [Tinker Bell] says she thinks she could get well again if children believed in fairies!

 

Do you know why swallows build in the eaves of houses? It is to listen to the stories.

 

[ Response to being asked, “Where do you live?” :] Second to the right and then straight on till morning.

 

From writing rapidly it does not result that one writes well, but from writing well it results that one writes rapidly.

He watched, stunned, and while he was watching, Rick died. He could tell when it happened. There was a difference.

 

An old author is constantly rediscovering himself in the more or less fossilized productions of his earlier years.

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

To crush, to annihilate a man utterly, to inflict on him the most terrible of punishments so that the most ferocious murderer would shudder at it and dread it beforehand, one need only give him work of an absolutely, completely useless and irrational character.

We must think things not words, or at least we must constantly translate our words into the facts for which they stand, if we are to keep the real and the true.

A woman never forgets her sex. She would rather talk with a man than an angel, any day.

The absence of vices adds so little to the sum of one’s virtues.

There is nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money. A man’s learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance; but the

What we have never had, remains; / It is the things we have that go.

I don’t believe the Devil would give half as much for the services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.

Truth is a torch which gleams in the fog but does not dispel it.

Man’s passion for truth is such that he will welcome the bitterest of all postulates so long as it strikes him as true.

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.

[I]t is never possible for a novelist to deny time inside the fabric of his novel: he must cling, however lightly, to the thread of his story, he must touch the interminable tapeworm, otherwise he becomes unintelligible, which, in his case, is a blunder.

To rest upon a formula is a slumber that, prolonged, means death.

To think great thoughts you must be heroes as well as idealists.

Time and space are fragments of the infinite for the use of finite creatures.

Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.

Wherever learning breeds specialists, the sum of human culture is enhanced thereby. That is the illusion and consolation of specialists.

A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

Talking is like playing on the harp; there is as much in laying the hand on the strings to stop their vibrations as in twanging them to bring out their music.

Real sorrow is incompatible with hope. No matter how great that sorrow may be, hope raises it one hundred cubits higher.

Society is always trying in some way or other to grind us down to a single flat surface.

Earth reserves no blessing / For the unblessed of Heaven!

We must exclude someone from our gathering, or we shall be left with nothing.

If you happen to have a wart on your nose or forehead, you cannot help imagining that no one in the world has anything else to do but stare at your wart, laugh at it, and condemn you for it, even though you have discovered America.

If your life at night is good, you think you have / Everything; but, if in that quarter things go wrong, / You will consider your best and truest interests /

The world’s great men have not commonly been great scholars, nor its great scholars great men.

A hush is over everything— / Silent as women wait for love, / The world is waiting for the spring.

The great end of being is to harmonize man with the order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may be so still.

What if one does say the same things,—of course in a little different form each time,—over and over? If he has anything to say worth saying, that is just what he ought to do.

All reformers are bachelors.

Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.

Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic.

At the very smallest wheel of our reasoning it is possible for a handful of questions to^reak the bank of our answers.

Analysis kills spontaneity. The grain once ground into flour springs and germinates no more.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

It is fairly obvious that those who are in favor of the death penalty have more affinity with assassins than those who are not.

It is a very curious fact that, with all our boasted “free and equal superiority over the communities of the Old World, our people [Americans] have the most enormous appetite for Old World titles of distinction.

Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers.

The printing-press is either the greatest blessing or the greatest curse of modern times, one sometimes forgets which.

Hardship is vanishing, but so is style, and the two are more closely connected than the present generation supposes.