Quotes to inspire and reflect

A person who talks with equal vivacity on every subject, excites no interest in any. Repose is as necessary in conversation as in a picture.

The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.

Reading makes a full man, meditation a profound man, discourse a clear man.

Very strong personalities must confine themselves in mutual conversation to very gentle subjects.

The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.

The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.

Private, accidental, confidential conversation breeds thought. Clubs produce oftener words.

No discussion between two persons can be of any use, until each knows clearly what it is that the other asserts.

Conversation, n. A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That’s why there are so few good conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.

Good-nature is more agreeable in conversation than wit, and gives a certain air to the countenance which is more amiable than beauty.

Sleep, riches, and health, to be truly enjoyed, must be interrupted.

It is by disease that health is pleasant; by evil that good is pleasant; by hunger, satiety; by weariness, rest.

We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.

My crown is called content; / A crown it is that seldom kings enjoy.

’Tis Opposites—entice—/ Deformed Men—ponder Grace— / Bright fires—the Blanketless— / The Lost—Day’s face— / The Blind—esteem it be / Enough Estate—to see—.

Oh, don’t the days seem lank and long, / When all goes right and nothing goes wrong / And isn't your life extremely flat / With nothing whatever to grumble at!

Be content with what thou hast received, and smooth thy frowning forehead, for the door of choice is not open either to thee or me.

That man is happiest / who lives from day to day and asks no more, / gamering the simple goodness of a life.

Better a little fire to warm us than a great one to burn us.

If you would know contentment, let your deeds be few.

Everything can be borne except contempt.

Moral contempt is a far greater indignity and insult than any kind of crime.

The great despisers are the great reverers.

Men more quickly learn and more gladly recall what they deride than what they approve and esteem.

There is no being so poor and so contemptible, who does not think there is somebody still poorer, and still more contemptible.

The man who thinks only of his own generation is born for few.

We are obliged to place ourselves on the level of our age before we can rise above it.

Woe to these people who have no appetite for the very dish that their age serves up.

A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.

I neglect God and his angles for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door.

Men’s minds are given to change in hate and friendship.

Faithfulness is to the emotional life what consistency is to the life of the intellect—simply a confession of failures.

It is as foolish to make experiments upon the constancy of a friend, as upon the chastity of a wife.

The heart grows weary after a little / Of what it loved for a little while.

To be capable of steady friendship or lasting love, are the two greatest proofs, not only of goodness of heart, but of strength of mind.

One man; two loves. No good ever comes of that.

We should measure affection, not like youngsters by the ardor of its passion, but by its strength and constancy.

Many a green isle needs must be / In the deep wide sea of Misery, / Or the mariner, worn and wan, / Never thus could voyage on.

To hold the same views at forty as we held at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years and to take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteach- able brat, well birched and none the wiser.

The kind of solace that arises from having company in misery is spiteful.

The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.

The consistent thinker, the consistently moral man, is either a walking mummy or else, if he has not succeeded in stifling all his vitality, a fanatical monomaniac.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

All reactionaries are paper tigers.

Orthodoxy: That peculiar condition where the patient can neither eliminate an old idea nor absorb a new one.