Quotes to inspire and reflect

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

Nobody can write the life of a man but those who have eaten and drunk and lived in social intercourse with him.

The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

How inexpressibly comfortable to know our fellow- creature; to see into him, understand his goings - forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it.

It’s a pity people pick and choose what they learn from the Bible.

T he Scripture in time of disputes is like an open town in time of war, which serves indifferently the occasions of both parties.

Though those that are betrayed / Do feel the treason sharply, yet the traitor / Stands in worse case of woe.

Those who talk of the Bible as a “monument of English prose” are merely admiring it as a monument over the grave of Christianity.

For I believe in harbors at the end.

They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience.

Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.

Of what worth are convictions that bring not suffering?

Man makes holy what he believes as he makes beautiful what he loves.

It is desire that engenders belief and il we fjiil as a rule to take this into account, it is because most of the desires that create beliefs end ... only with our own life.

Through fear of resembling one another, through horror at having to submit, through uncertainty as well, through skepticism and complexity, there is a multitude of individual little beliefs for the triumph of strange little individuals.

Loving is half of believing.

He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.

The belief that becomes truth for me ... is that which allows me the best use of my strength, the best means of putting my virtues into action.

Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and almost entirely unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live.

Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.

Yasha spent his Sabbath talking and smoking cigarettes among musicians. To the earnest moralists who attempted to get him to change his ways, he would always answer: “When were you in heaven, and what did God look like?”

It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.

Fine conduct is always spontaneous.

Right conduct can never, except by some rare accident, be prompted by ignorance or hindered by knowledge.

The conduct of our lives is the true mirror of our doctrine.

We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold.

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

Behavior, n. Conduct, as determined, not by principle, but by breeding.

Conduct is three-fourths of our life and its largest concern.

Life never presents us with anything which may not be looked upon as a fresh starting point, no less than as a termination.

It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

You begin well in nothing except you end well.

Once begun, / A task is easy; half the work is done.

The births of all things are weak and tender, and therefore we should have our eyes intent on beginnings.

Beggars should be abolished entirely! Verily, it is annoying to give to them and it is annoying not to give to them.

The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.

A man’s bed is his cradle, but a woman’s is often her rack.

’Tis very warm weather when one’s in bed.

As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.

Was it for this I uttered prayers, / And sobbed and cursed and kicked the stairs, / That now, domestic as a plate, / I should retire at half-past eight?

He that riseth late must trot all day.

Nothing lasts except beauty—and I shall create that.

Ask a toad what is beauty ...; he will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.

They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

Such is beauty ever,—neither here nor there, now nor then,—neither in Rome nor in Athens, but wherever there is a soul to admire.

O Beauty, find thyself in love, not in the flattery of thy mirror.

To keep beauty in its place is to make all things beautiful.

Beauty is truth’s smile / when she beholds her own face / in a perfect mirror.