Quotes to inspire and reflect

Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.

One may be confuted and yet not convinced.

Argument seldom convinces anyone contrary to his inclinations.

A majority is always the best repartee.

I am sometimes visited by the heretical thought that there is no such thing as good and bad architecture, any more than there is good and bad nature. It is all in where you stand at the time.

It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy, but he who has shown the most forbearance and the better temper.

No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.

Lovely promise and quick ruin are seen nowhere better than in Gothic architecture.

If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.

Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently—and a good half of it is palpably useless.

No building was safe from the furniture, the pictures, the human beings that it would presently contain.

Even the West has known the architecture of empty space, whose object, for thousands of years, has been less to construct divine houses, than to create sacred places, to seize upon mystery and to immerse man in it—whether by raising the cyclopean pedestal that surrounds him with stars, or by hollowing out the sanctuary that wraps him in haunted night.

Women fear endangering men’s approval so much, we don’t even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.

The brevity of human life gives a melancholy to the profession of the architect.

What is the voice of song, when the world lacks the ear of taste?

A really great people, proud and high-spirited, would face all the disasters of war rather than purchase that base prosperity which is bought at the price of national honor.

If once you have paid him the Danegeld / You never get rid of the Dane.

No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.

It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so.

Be content to seem what you really are.

A good presence is letters of recommendation.

What is not seen is as if it was not. Even the Right does not receive proper consideration if it does not seem right.

“Excuse me, pray.” Without that excused would not have known there was anything amiss.

Always scorn appearances and you always may.

Apologies only account for that which they do not alter.

My apprehensions come in crowds; / I dread the rustling of the grass; / The very shadows of the clouds / Have power to shake me as they pass: / I question things and do not find / One that will answer to my mind; / And all the world appears unkind.

Antiquity is full of the praises of another antiquity still more remote.

We are more often frightened than hurt: our troubles spring more often from fancy than reality.

The best thing about animals is that they don’t talk much.

Had the Greeks held novelty in such disdain as we, what work of ancient date would now exist?

The cow crunching with depressed head surpasses any statue, / And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

My favorite animal is the mule. He has more horse sense than a horse. He knows when to stop eating—and he knows when to stop working.

Cats are a standing rebuke to behavioral scientists wanting to know how the minds of animals work. The mind of a cat is an unscrutable mystery.

To escort a cat abroad on a leash is against the nature of a cat, and to permit it to venture forth for exercise unattended into a night of new dangers is against the nature of the owner.

I need a dog pretty badly. I dreamed of dogs last night. They sat in a circle and looked at me and I wanted all of them.

Charley is a mind-reading dog. There have been many trips in his lifetime, and often he has to be left at home. He knows we are going long before the suitcase has come out, and he paces and worries and whines and goes into a state of mild hysteria, old as he is.

O happy dogs of England/Bark well at errand boys/If you lived anywhere else/You would not be allowed to make such an infernal noise.

There is one respect in which brutes show real wisdom when compared with us—I mean their quiet, placid enjoyment of the present moment.

A dog gets lonesome just like a human. He wants to associate with other dogs, but when they take him out, the poor dog is on a leash and cannot run around.

It is a deep-lying patriarchal instinct in the dog which leads him—at least in the more manly, outdoor breeds—to recognize and honor in the man of the house and head of the family his absolute master and overlord, protector of the hearth; and to find in the relation of vassalage to him the basis and value of his own existence, whereas his attitude toward the rest of the family is much more independent.

Everyone’s pet is the most outstanding. This begets mutual blindness.

The Rum Turn Tugger is a terrible bore.AVhen you let him in, then he wants to be out;/He's always on the wrong side of every door,/And as soon as he's at home, then he'd like to get about.

The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, / With an indolent expression and an undulating throat / Like an unsuccessful literary man.

Is it not wonderful, that the love of the [animal] parent should be so violent while it lasts and that it should last no longer than is necessary for the preservation of the young?

The brain may devise laws for the blood, but a hot temper leaps o’er a cold decree.

There is no old age for a man’s anger, / Only death.

He who doesn’t know anger doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know the immediate.

How often, being moved under a false cause, if the person offending makes a good defense and presents us with a just excuse, are we angry against truth and innocence itself?