Quotes to inspire and reflect

We seek not the worldwide victory of one nation or system but a worldwide victory of men.

The supreme reality of our time is our indivisibility as children of God and the common vulnerability of this planet.

I ought not to fear to survive my own people so long as there are men in the world; for there are always some whom one can love.

A man may have strong humanitarian and democratic principles; but if he happens to have been brought up as a bath-taking, shirt-changing lover of fresh air, he will have to overcome certain physical repugnances before he can bring himself to put those principles into practice.

There is the sky, which is all men’s together, there / is the world to live in, fill with houses of our own / nor hold another’s, nor tear it from his hands by force.

He that bringeth a present findeth the door open.

They say the gods themselves / Are moved by gifts, and gold does more with men than words.

A friend that you buy with presents will be bought from you.

Men of few words are the best men.

All pleasantry should be short; and it might even be as well were the serious short also.

When I struggle to be terse, I end by being obscure.

To be brief is almost a condition of being inspired.

Brevity is very good, / When we are, or are not understood.

Least said is soonest disavowed.

Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.

I have pretty large experience of boys, and you're a bad set of fellows.

If the best company is that which we leave feeling most satisfied with ourselves, it follows that it is the company we leave most bored.

Each man reserves to himself alone the right of being tedious.

A nap, my friend, is a brief period of sleep which overtakes superannuated persons when they endeavour to entertain unwelcome visitors or to listen to scientific lectures.

Boredom is not an end product, is comparatively rather an early stage in life and art. You’ve got to go by or past or through boredom, as through a filter, before the clear product emerges.

Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack.

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.

Why should we leave it to Harper 8c Brothers and Redding 8c Co. to select our reading?

It is with books as with men—a very small number play a great part; the rest are lost in the multitude.

Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations.

Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage.... Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings and emperors, exert an influence on mankind.

Hard-covered books break up friendships. You loan a hard-covered book to a friend and when he doesn't return it you get mad at him. It makes you mean and petty. But twenty-five-cent books are different.

Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they are written.

I have lost all sense of home, having moved about so much. It means to me now—only that place were the books are kept.

It is impossible to read in America, except on a train, because of the telephone. Everyone has a telephone, and it rings all day and most of the night.

They like my books better in England than in France; a translation would be very successful there.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.

How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!

Books for all the world are always foul-smelling books: the smell of small people clings to them.

A book is made better by good readers and clearer by good opponents.

I seek in the reading of books, only to please myself, by an honest diversion.

He that I am reading seems always to have the most force.

Every abridgement of a good book is a stupid abridgement.

The only important thing in a book is the meaning it has for you.

Never had he lost himself in a book as one does when that single work seems the most important in the world; unique, a little, all-embracing universe, into which one plunges and submerges oneself in order to draw nourishment out of every syllable.

Make him [the reader] laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him in the right way and your reputation is assured.

There are favorable hours for reading a book, as for writing it.

I have decided that the trouble with print is, it never changes its mind.

There is as much trickery required to grow rich by a stupid book as there is folly in buying it.

In some respects the better a book is, the less it demands from binding.

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention; and the world, therefore, swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

A bad book is as much of a labour to write as a good one; it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.