Quotes to inspire and reflect

The articulate voice is more distracting than mere noise.

Precision of communication is important, more important than ever, in our era of hair-trigger balances, when a false, or misunderstood word may create as much disaster as a sudden thoughtless act.

I distrust the incommunicable; it is the source of all violence.

We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them.

When the eyes say one thing, and the tongue another, a practised man relies on the language of the first.

Use what language you will, you can never say anything but what you are.

Why level downward to our dullest perception always, and praise that as common sense? The commonest sense is the sense of men asleep, which they express by snoring.

Most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes.

The best prophet is common sense, our native wit.

Fine sense and exalted sense are not half so useful as common sense.

To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.

Poverty, Frost, Famine, Rain, Disease, are the beadles and guardsmen that hold us to Common Sense.

Comedy has ceased to be a challenge to the mental processes. It has become a therapy of relaxation, a kind of tranquilizing drug.

The people you like when you meet them and while you know them, and the people you remember fondly, are invariably people who have a sense of comedy, not just a sense of humor.

Comedy appeals to the collective mind of the audience and this grows fatigued; while farce appeals to a more robust organ, their collective belly.

Comedy naturally wears itself out—destroys the very food on which it lives; and by constantly and successfully exposing the follies and weaknesses of mankind to ridicule, in the end leaves itself nothing worth laughing at.

All comedians are people who really deeply consider the human experience not only a dirty trick perpetrated by a totally meaningless procedure of accidents, but an unbearable ordeal every day, which can

It is very difficult to be wholly joyous or wholly sad on this earth. The comic, when it is human, soon takes upon itself the face of pain.

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

All that the comedian has to show for his years of work and aggravation is the echo of forgotten laughter.

Colors speak all languages.

Grey is a colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour.

What makes people hard-hearted is this, that each man has, or fancies he has, as much as he can bear in his own troubles.

Men of cold passions have quick eyes.

Are you then unable to recognize a sob unless it has the same sound as yours?

The cold in clime are cold in blood, / Their love can scarce deserve the name.

Here’s a good rule of thumb: / Too clever is dumb.

It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize, / And to be swift is less than to be wise.

Hood an ass with reverend purple, / So you can hide his two ambitious ears, / And he shall pass for a cathedral doctor.

I have always considered a clergyman as the father of a larger family than he is able to maintain.

What separates two people most profoundly is a different sense and degree of cleanliness.

A broad hat does not always cover a venerable head.

Hygiene is the corruption of medicine by morality.

I test my bath before I sit, / And I’m always moved to wonderment / That what chills the finger not a bit / Is so frigid upon the fundament.

People who wash much have a high mind about it, and talk down to those who wash little.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made an essential and godliness is regarded as an offence.

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for 11s!

A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.

[Literature begins with the possible model of experience, and what it produces is the literary model we call the classic.

Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle class plan for future generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.

In class society everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.

I was told that the Privileged and the People formed two nations.

Clarity is the politeness of the man of letters.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

A matter that becomes clear ceases to concern us.

Every man speaks and writes with intent to be understood; and it can seldom happen but he that understands himself might convey his notions to another, if, content to be understood, he did not seek to be admired.

What is conceived well is expressed clearly, / And the words to say it with arrive with ease.