Quotes to inspire and reflect

To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.

Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, / And yet a third of Life is passed in sleep.

Perhaps the best proof of the Almighty’s existence is that we never know when we are to die.

To die is to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

To him, perpetual thought of death was a sin. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.

It is as natural to die as to be born.

Unless a writer is extremely old when he dies, in which case he has probably become a neglected institution, his death must always seem untimely.

Pain lays not its touch / Upon a corpse.

I answer the heroic question “Death, where is thy sting?” with “It is here in my heart and mind and memories."

The only true infidelity is for a live man to vote himself dead.

The worst evil of all is to leave the ranks of the living before one dies.

It takes so many years / To learn that one is dead.

It is nothing to die; it is frightful not to live.

It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it's just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.

Shame on the soul, to falter on the road of life while the body still perseveres.

A fluent tongue is the only thing a mother don’t like her daughter to resemble her in.

Trust not your daughter’s minds / By what you see them act.

To an old father, nothing is more sweet / Than a daughter. Boys are more spirited, but their ways / Are not so tender.

I sometimes have the feeling that her entire life was merely a continuation of her mother’s, much as the course of a ball on the billiard table is merely the continuation of the player’s arm movement.

It was that hour of dusk when the streetlights and headlights come on but make little difference.

In darkness one may be / ashamed of what one does, without the shame of disgrace.

When tremendous dangers are involved, no one can be blamed for looking to his own interest.

It is pleasurable, when winds disturb the waves of a great sea, to gaze out from land upon the great trials of another.

Any danger spot is tenable if men—brave men— will make it so.

Great perils have this beauty, that they bring to light the fraternity of strangers.

The wise man in the storm prays God, not for safety from danger, but for deliverance from fear.

A man who has been in danger / When he comes out of it forgets his fears, / And sometimes he forgets his promises.

Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.

Dangers, by being despised, grow great.

There is nothing sacred about convention: there is nothing sacred about primitive passions or whims; but the fact that a convention exists indicates that a way of living has been devised capable of maintaining itself.

Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.

We are more sensible of what is done against custom than against nature. ^

Custom determines what is agreeable.

Custom creates the whole of equity, for the simple reason that it is accepted.

There are a lot of people who must have the table laid in the usual fashion or they will not enjoy the dinner.

There is nothing so extreme that is not allowed by the custom of some nation or other.

When one wants to change manners and customs, one should not do so by changing the laws.

He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.

Custom is a second nature, and no less powerful.

Customs are made for customary circumstances, and customary characters.

What humanity abhors, custom reconciles and recommends to us.

Innumerable are the illusions and legerdemain- tricks of custom: but of all of these, perhaps the cleverest is hqr knack of persuading us that the miraculous, by simple repetition, ceases to be miraculous.

What men call civilization is the condition of present customs; what they call barbarism, the condition of past ones.

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

Since custom is the principal magistrate of man’s life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs.

Glory and curiosity are the two scourges of the soul; the last prompts us to thrust our noses into everything, the other forbids us to leave anything doubtful and undecided.

Enquire not what boils in another’s pot.