Quotes to inspire and reflect

Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.

Chastity is not chastity in an old man, but a disability to be unchaste.

Be warm, but pure; be amorous, but be chaste.

The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one’s life towards a goal.

All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.

The silver ore of pure charity is an expensive article in the catalogue of a man’s good qualities.

In faith and hope the world will disagree, / But all mankind’s concern is charity.

Character begins to form at the first pinch of anxiety about ourselves.

I as little fear that God will damn a man that has charity, as I hope that the priests can save one who has not.

No one is ignorant that our character and turn of mind are intimately connected with the water-closet.

A career in flying was like climbing one of those ancient Babylonian pyramids made up of a dizzy progression of steps and ledges, a ziggurat, a pyramid extraordinarily high and steep; and the idea was to prove at every foot of the way up that pyramid that you were one of the elected and anointed ones who had the right stujf and could move higher and higher and even—ultimately, God willing, one day—that you might be able to join that special few at the very top, that elite who had the capacity to bring tears to men’s eyes, the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.

Character is inured habit.

The ultimate test of a nation’s character is not how it responds to adversity in war but how it meets the challenge of peace.

Talking in a soft modest voice, he [Barry Goldwater] radiated at this moment the skinny boy-

Listen to a man’s words and look at the pupil of his eye. How can a man conceal his character?

A man’s character is his guardian divinity.

The more peculiarly his own a man’s character is, the better it fits him.

Everything that has been is eternal: the sea will wash it up again.

He had fallen into the usual masculine blunder of mixing up smartness of intelligence with strength of character.

Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness.

In every age of well-marked transition there is the pattern of habitual dumb practice and emotion which is passing, and there is oncoming a new complex of habit.

Time, in the turning-over of days, works change for better or worse.

When old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.

Whenever a thing changes and quits its proper limits, this change is at once the death of that which was before.

All is change; all yields its place and goes.

Through loyalty to the past, our mind refuses to realize that tomorrow’s joy is possible only if today’s makes way for it; that each wave owes the beauty of its line only to the withdrawal of the preceding one.

In the life of one man, never / The same time returns.

Change as change is mere flux and lapse; it insults intelligence. Genuinely to know is to grasp a permanent end that realizes itself through changes.

For what wears out the life of mortal men? / ’Tis that from change to change their being rolls; / ’Tis that repeated shocks, again, again, / Exhaust the energy of strongest souls / And numb the elastic powers.

On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.

Why should man fear since chance is all in all / for him, and he can clearly foreknow nothing? / Best to live lightly, as one can, unthinkingly.

Chance makes a football of man’s life.

Every possession and every happiness is but lent by chance for an uncertain time, and may therefore

If I'd gotten the job I wanted at Montgomery Ward, 1 suppose I would never have left Illinois.

Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them; no art can keep or acquire them.

Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs because of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute.

There is an ambush everywhere from the army of accidents; therefore the rider of life runs with loosened reins.

Enjoy yourself, drink, call the life you live today / your own, but only that, the rest belongs to chance.

It is not Justice the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune—the ally of patient Time—that holds an even and scrupulous balance.

They who lose today may win tomorrow.

Certainties are arrived at only on foot.,

Life is full of chances and changes, and the most prosperous of men may in the evening of his days meet with great misfortunes.

There is only one thing about which I am certain, and this is that there is very little about which one can be certain.

Every area of trouble gives out a ray of hope, and the one unchangeable certainty is that nothing is certain or unchangeable.

I try not to guess.

To have his path made clear for him is the aspiration of every human being in our beclouded and tempestuous existence.