Quotes to inspire and reflect

The Revolution is like Saturn, it devours its own children.

 

I’m youth, I’m joy, I’m a little bird that has broken out of the egg.

 

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

 

Proud and insolent youth, prepare to meet thy doom.

 

[ Explaining how to fly :] You just think lovely wonderful thoughts and they lift you up in the air.

 

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.

 

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

 

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

The unpublished manuscript is like an unconfessed sin that festers in the soul, corrupting and contaminating it.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Truth is a flower in whose neighbourhood others must wither.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 /

Earth reserves no blessing / For the unblessed of Heaven!

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

All reformers are bachelors.

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.

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.

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.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.