Quotes to inspire and reflect

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

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 book on cheap paper does not convince. It is not prized, it is like a wheezy doctor with pigtail tobacco breath, who needs a manicure.

The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others.

To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him, and travel in his company.

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

I should as soon think of swimming across Charles River, when I wish to go to Boston, as of reading all my books in originals, when I have them rendered for me in my mother tongue.

Books take their place according to their specific gravity as surely as potatoes in a tub.

A book is not harmless merely because no one is consciously offended by it.

A precious—mouldering pleasure—tis— / To meet an Antique Book— / In just th§ Dress his Century wore— / A privilege—I think—.

When one can read, can penetrate the enchanted realm of books, why write?

In books lies the soul of the whole past time.

“What is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

Books succeed, / And lives fail.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

It is the bold man who every time does best, at home or abroad.

The best mask for demoralization is daring.

In almost any society, I think, the quality of the nonconformists is likely to be just as good as and no better than that of the conformists.

Boldness, without the rules of propriety, becomes insubordination.

It is not difficult to be unconventional in the eyes of the world when your unconventionality is but the convention of your set.

Gwilym was a tall young man aged nearly twenty, with a thin stick of a body and spade-shaped face. You could dig the garden with him.

What is more important in life than our bodies or in the world than what we look like?

Body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.

Only death reveals what a nothing the body of man is.

The dear, stupid body is as easily satisfied as a spaniel.

The pain others give passes away in their later kindness, but that of our own blunders, especially when they hurt our vanity, never passes away.

You must stir it and stump it, / And blow your own trumpet, / Or trust me, you haven’t a chance.

Great blunders are often made, like large ropes, of a multitude of fibres.

We run carelessly to the precipice, after we have put something before us to prevent us seeing it.

Most people do not take heed of the things they encounter, nor do they grasp them even when they have learned about them, although they suppose they do.

He does not weep who does not see.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

As they say of the blind, / Sounds are the things I see.

Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way. It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living.

We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

Only in the case of the Negro has the melting pot failed to bring a minority into the full stream of American life.

Having despised us, it is not strange that Americans should seek to render us despicable; having enslaved us, it is natural that they should strive to prove us unfit for freedom; having denounced us as indolent, it is not strange that they should cripple our enterprises.

Our dehumanization of the Negro then is indivisible from our dehumanization of ourselves; the loss of our own identity is the price we pay for our annulment of his.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

An American Negro, however deep his sympathies, or however bright his rage, ceases to be simply a black man when he faces a black man from Africa.

The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral. All the pills did was take every bit of pleasure out of sex.

Our birth is nothing but our death begun.

The hour which gives us life begins to take it away.

The best thing for a man to do is to be born and, being born, to die at once.

One must mourn not the death of men, but their birth.

Cheerfulness is proper to the cock, which rejoices over every little thing, and crows with varied and lively movements.

If you lie down in a village square hoping to capture a sea gull, you could stay there your whole life without succeeding. But a hundred miles from shore it’s different. Sea gulls have a highly developed instinct for self-preservation on land but at sea they’re very cocky.