Quotes to inspire and reflect

Death is the supple Suitor / That wins at last— / It is a stealthy Wooing / Conducted first / By pallid innuendoes / And dim approach / But brave at last with Bugles.

Death is always sad, I suppose, to us who look forward to it: I expect it will seem very different when we can look back upon it.

What is this Death?—a quiet of the heart? / The whole of that of which we are a part?

The dead are all holy, even they that were base and wicked while alive. Their baseness and wickedness was not they, was but the heavy and unmanageable environment that lay round them.

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.

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

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

Death is the supreme festival on the road to freedom.

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

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.

It is as natural to die as to be born.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasures.

Dangers, by being despised, grow great.

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.

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.

Custom determines what is agreeable.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.