Quotes to inspire and reflect

The only living language is the language in which we think and have our being.

Judges commonly are elderly men, and are more likely to hate at sight any analysis to which they are not accustomed, and which disturbs repose of mind, than to fall in love with novelties.

There is no subject so old that something new cannot be said about it.

Florence she found perfectly sweet, Naples a dream, but very whiffy. In Rome one had simply to sit still and feel.

Beware of the community in which blasphemy does not exist: underneath, atheism runs rampant.

The joy of life is to put out one’s power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. And the real misery is not to do this.

Intuition attracts those who wish to be spiritual without any bother, because it promises a heaven where the intuitions of others can be ignored.

Little-minded people’s thoughts move in such small circles that five minutes’ conversation gives you an arc long enough to determine their whole curve. An arc in the movement of a large intellect does not sensibly differ from a straight line.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

People who honestly mean to be true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try' to be “consistent.”

Inventors and men of genius have almost always been regarded as fools at the beginning (and very often at the end) of their careers.

Any new formula which suddenly emerges in our consciousness has its roots in long trains of thought; it is virtually old when it first makes its appearance among the recognized growths of our intellect.

There never was an idea started that woke up men out of their stupid indifference but its originator was spoken of as a crank.

We must not roughly smash other people’s idols because we know, or think we know, that they are of cheap human manufacture.

We are always making God our accomplice, that so we may legalize our own iniquities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.

Humility is a quality for which I have only a limited admiration. In many phases of life it is a great

In abstract love of humanity one almost always only loves oneself.

The worst of a modern stylish mansion is, that it has no place for ghosts.

It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why History is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.

Hell is the bloodcurdling mansion of time, in whose profoundest circle Satan himself waits, winding a gargantuan watch in his hand.

An efficiency-regime cannot be run without a few heroes stuck about it to carry off the dullness—much as plums have to be put into a bad pudding to make it palatable.

To learn new habits is everything, for it is to reach the substance of life. Life is but a tissue of habits.

Happiness does not lie in happiness, but in the achievement of it.

A great man represents a great ganglion in the nerves of society, or, to vary the figure, a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of his greatness consists in his being there.

I distrust Great Men. They produce a desert of uniformity around them and often a pool of blood too, and I always feel a little man’s pleasure when they come a cropper.

The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable. Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.

Government and co-operation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.

Talent is a very common family trait; genius belongs rather to individuals—just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but rarely a whole brood of either.

Talent is often to be envied, and genius very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of dying in a hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.

A person of genius should marry a person of character. Genius does not herd with genius.

After sixty years the stern sentence of the burial service seems to have a meaning that one did not notice in former years. There begins to be something personal about it.

One cannot help using his early friends as the seaman uses the log, to mark his progress.

Freedom is a very great reality. But it means, above all things, freedom from lies.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

[I]t is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

Failure or success seem to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse.

You canna expect to be baith grand and comfortable.

Fame usually comes to those who are thinking about something else.

Faith, to my mind, is a stiffening process, a sort of mental starch, which ought to be applied as sparingly as possible.

A wise man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but he bows to the authority of a particular fact.

No one can shed light on vices he does not have or afflictions he has never experienced.

Even though a god, I have learned to obey the times.

Every person’s feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered.

It is not that the Englishman can't feel—it is that he is afraid to feel. He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks—his pipe might fall out if he did.

The main part of intellectual education is not the acquisition of facts but learning how to make facts live.

The emotions may be endless. The more we express them, the more we may have to express.

He who is too much afraid of being duped has lost the power of being magnanimous.