Quotes to inspire and reflect

Feasts must be solemn and rare, or else they cease to be feasts.

It is superstition to put one’s hope in formalities; but it is pride to be unwilling to submit to them.

Censorship may be useful for the preservation of morality, but can never be so for its restoration.

Ritualism, n. A Dutch Garden of God where He may walk in rectilinear freedom, keeping off the grass.

Men in earnest have no time to waste / In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

Persons who undertake to pry into, or cleanse out all the filth of a common sewer, either cannot have very nice noses, or will soon lose them.

The awful thing about most people is their caution—the crawling, abject bird-in-a-hand theory.

When a man feels the difficulty of doing, can he be other than cautious and slow in speaking?

A good cause and a good tongue: and yet money must carry it.

In a just cause the weak will beat the strong.

When great causes are on the move in the world, stirring all men’s souls, drawing them from their firesides, casting aside comfort, wealth and the pursuit of happiness in response to impulses at once awe- striking and irresistible, we learn that we are spirits, not animals.

Those whose cause is just will never lack / good arguments.

Our least deed, like the young of the land crab, wends its way to the sea of cause and effect as soon as born, and makes a drop there to eternity.

Every why hath a wherefore.

Shallow men believe in luck.... Strong men believe in cause and effect.

The secret of the world is the tie between person and event. Person makes event and event person.

Take away the cause, and the effect ceases; what the eye ne’er sees, the heart ne’er rues.

If men and women are in chains, anywhere in the world, then freedom is endangered everywhere.

A businessman is someone who buys at ten and is happy to get out at twelve. The other kind of man buys at ten, sees it rise to eighteen and does nothing. He is waiting for it to rise to twenty. When it drops to two he waits for it to get back to ten.

The great dynamic success of capitalism had given us a powerful weapon in our battle against Communism—money.

In the market economy the price that is offered is counted upon to produce the result that is sought.

Landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed.

Pleasing ware is half sold.

When I call on a client, I come by cab, and I am sleek and clean and foursquare. I carry myself as though I’ve made a quiet killing on the stock market, and have come to call more as a public service than anything else.

The urge to consume is fathered by the value system which emphasizes the ability of the society to produce.

He who findeth fault meaneth to buy.

Auctioneer, n. The man who proclaims with a hammer that he has picked a pocket with his tongue.

He that speaks ill of the mare will buy her.

In democracies, nothing is more great or more brilliant than commerce: it attracts the attention of the public, and fills the imagination of the multitude; all energetic passions are directed towards it.

It takes no more actual sagacity to carry on the everyday hawking and haggling of the world, or to ladle out its normal doses of bad medicine and worse law, than it takes to operate a taxicab or fry a pan of fish.

It is difficult but not impossible to conduct strictly honest business. What is true is that honesty is incompatible with the amassing of a large fortune.

Production only fills a void that it has itself created.

For the merchant, even honesty is a financial speculation.

The riskiness of modern corporate life is in fact the harmless conceit of the modern corporate executive, and it is vigorously proclaimed. Precisely because he lives an orderly and careful life the executive is moved to identify himself with the dashing entrepreneur of economic literature.

Time is the measure of business.

There would be a black, six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow, and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan’s grave.

A cemetery saddens us because it is the only place of the world in which we do not meet our dead again.

Heap not on this mound / Roses that she loved so well; / Why bewilder her with roses, / That she cannot see or smell?

It makes small difference to the dead, if they / are buried in the tokens of luxury. All this / is an empty glorification left for those who live.

The marble keeps merely a cold and sad memory of a man who would else be forgotten. No man who needs a monument ever ought to have one.

I guess this is why I hate governments, all governments. It is always the rule, the fine print, carried out by fine-print men. There’s nothing to fight, no wall to hammer with frustrated fists.

Epitaph, n. An inscription on a tomb, showing that virtues acquired by death have a retroactive effect.

His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops.

Large organization is loose organization. Nay, it would be almost as true to say that organization is always disorganization.

Our true nationality is mankind.

The Federal Government is the people and the budget is a reflection of their need.

There is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, / When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!

Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave.