Quotes to inspire and reflect

A thousand things advance; nine hundred and ninety-nine retreat: that is progress.

Everywhere the basis of principle is tradition.

In a crowd, on a journey at a banquet even, a line of thought can itself provide its own seclusion.

I had rather ride on an ass that carries me than a horse that throws me.

The preacher’s garment is cut according to the pattern of that of the hearers, for the most part.

A taste for dirty stories may be said to be inherent in the human animal.

Poverty comes pleading, not for charity, for the most part, but imploring us to find a purchaser for its unmarketable wares.

Poetry is the plough that turns up time in such a Way that the abyssal strata of time, its black earth, appear on the surface.

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for the rise of another. But ideal mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror.

When you write in prose you say what you mean. When you write in rhyme you say what you must.

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

The axis of the earth sticks out visibly through the centre of each and every town or city.

Pity wraps the student of the past in an ambrosial cloud, and washes his limbs with eternal youth.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

The difference between gossip and philosophy lies only in one’s way of taking a fact.

Man never knows what he wants; he aspires to penetrate mysteries and as soon as he has, wants to re-establish them. Ignorance irritates him and knowledge cloys.

The people like neither the true nor the simple; they like novels and charlatans.

The only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at least, not to express them.

The longer we live, the more we find we are like other persons.

If only the sense of actuality can be lulled—and it sleeps for ever in most historians—there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

A man’s opinions are generally of much more value than his arguments.

With effervescing opinions, as with the not yet forgotten champagne, the quickest way to let them go flat is to let them get exposed to the air.

Envy not the old man the tranquillity of his existence, nor yet blame him if it sometimes looks like apathy. Time, the inexorable, does not threaten him with the scythe so often as with the sand-bag. He does not cut, but he stuns and stupefies.

After the great destructions / Everyone will prove that he was innocent.

To be forgotten is to sleep in peace with the undisturbed myriads, no longer subject to the chills and heats, the blasts, the sleet, the dust, which assail in endless succession that shadow of a man which we call his reputation.

We give to necessity the praise of virtue.

The correlative to loving our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our neighbors.

That which one cannot experience in daily life is not true for oneself.

Our brains are seventy-year clocks. The Angel of Life winds them up once for all, then closes the case, and gives the key into the hand of the Angel of the Resurrection.

Our system of morality is a body'of imperfect social generalizations expressed in terms of emotion.

Money is coined liberty, and so it is ten times dearer to a man who is deprived of freedom. If money is jingling in his pocket, he is half consoled, even though he cannot spend it.

I should like to see any kind of a man, distinguishable from a gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman could not shape a husband out of.

Men, like peaches and pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay.

When I can look Life in the eyes, / Grown calm and very coldly wise, / Life will have given me the Truth, / And taken in exchange—my youth.

Oh better than the minting / Of a gold-crowned king / Is the safe-kept memory / Of a lovely thing.

I refuse to see literature as amusement, as a game.

Man would be otherwise. That is the essence of the specifically human.

We expect more of ourselves than we have any right to, in virtue of our endowments.

Our final experience, like our first, is conjectural. We move between two darknesses.

Life is a frail moth flying / Caught in the web of the years that pass.

Now at last I have come to see what life is, / Nothing is ever ended, everything only begun, / And the brave victories that seem so splendid / Are never really won.

The hungry and the homeless don’t care about liberty any more than they care about cultural heritage. To pretend that they do care is cant.

Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.

The law is the witness and external deposit of our moral life. Its history is the history of the moral development of the race.

One can know a man from his laugh, and if you like a man’s laugh before you know anything of him, you may confidently say that he is a good man.

To be master of any branch of knowledge, you must master those which lie next to it; and thus to know anything you must know all.